Bred to Suffer
by Desdemona Kakalose
Summary: AU from Batman comics #48: Bruce does not take up the mantle of Batman again, and John Doe, of the uncannily wide smile and the acid green eyes, deals with a creeping sense of dread that something is poised to go very, very wrong. Batjokes
1. in the dark, in this room

Part viii contains adult situations, please skip that if you are uncomfortable

* * *

Cause I'm bad, bred to suffer

in the dark, in this room

i.

The name on his release papers says John Doe, but he knows that isn't a real name. His boss at the butcher's shop calls him Jack, although whether that's a careless error of memory or a real nickname he doesn't know. Still. It's the closest thing he has to a name of his own, so he grabs it with both hands as if he's afraid that someone will notice what he's got and take it away. Maybe he is. He feels like he's living under the shade of a guillotine, waiting for the blade to drop.

He's standing in the window of the place he rents, and his eyes feel heavy and bruised in his skull. He's slept maybe an hour. It would be better if it had been dreams that did this to him, because dreams at least have a substance that you can hold onto. All he has is this frightful feeling that something is wrong, that something is wrong and dangerous and it's coming close now, closer every night, drawing itself up across his sheets to where he lies panting and frozen on his pillows.

He rubs his eye with the heel of his palm. Across the street, blue neon is blinking. It's a cold light, worse than no light at all. This city is so bright and noisy and sometimes he craves true darkness with a hunger that makes him nervous. Cave darkness. Restful darkness.

He pulls on his jacket, steps into his shoes, and leaves. Anywhere is better than here. He briefly entertains a fantasy of just becoming homeless, giving up on beds and on sleep altogether while he's at it. It's a silly fantasy, but it helps. He ducks out into the street and makes his way to Rhine Road, where they've been planting trees as part of Wayne Enterprises' city beautification project. He likes to see their progress. The trees were grown somewhere else, he expects, because their hardy trunks are unspotted by the wear of pollution. Probably most trees that grow in the heart of Gotham would be poisonous to burn, with the amount of joker toxin and fear gas that passes through the air on a year to year basis. He's wondering if you could read that sort of information in the rings of the wood when his eyes light on the figure across the freeway, and he abruptly loses track of anything and everything else.

The golden globes of streetlights turn the median shades of yellow and green, as vibrant as the sky is dark. It's like a patch of gemstone in the cool dimness of the city. Under the light, there is a man staring up into the cloudless night. He's too far away to see clearly, and yet—Jack's heart pounds like a demolition crew, dangerous and heavy in his chest—and yet Jack knows in his bones that this man is the most beautiful man ever born. Cars race past, cutting the vision into snapshots, the end of a reel of film slowing to show the black edges of each slide.

 _I'm in love again_ , he thinks. And then he thinks, _again?_

For the first time in weeks, Jack sleeps out the rest of the night. Jack does not realize until much, much later who he has seen.

ii.

Batman doesn't save the city. The city is saved, but it wasn't Batman. Jack doesn't know the details; some part of him tuned out the moment he heard that it wasn't the bat. He's grateful for all the heroes, of course, but that doesn't mean he needs to track their every move like some celebrity-obsessed gossip monger. In the aftermath, a few days later, he finds Bruce Wayne in the park by the lake again, and realizes all at once that he had expected this when he left his house that evening, and he would have been startled to arrive here and find the bench empty.

"Penny for your thoughts?" he says, watching Bruce Wayne's back as he hunches over his clasped hands, deep in his own mind. The sound of a voice jolts Wayne, causes him to half swing himself up on the seat of the bench as if he's going to launch into the air. He freezes when he sees who it is.

"Oh," he says. "It's you."

Jack's no stranger to lukewarm welcomes and doesn't let it stop him. He points at the other half on the seat, where Wayne's foot is still planted, ready for action. "Mind if I sit?" he asks.

Wayne almost looks like he's going to say yes, but then his eyes drift to the banks of the lake and he makes a small, assenting sound. Jack takes the seat. He thinks about how Wayne had left half the bench open before he arrived, wishes he could know if that empty seat had anything to do with him.

"Why do you bring that bread?" Wayne asks him, eyeing the paper bag in his hands. "There's never any ducks here."

"For the fish, of course," Jack replies. He smiles, lifts a crust of it for inspection. "The bakery next to the shop where I work throws it out once it's too old."

"Why?" Wayne asks again.

Jack looks out across the inky expanse of the lake, where the surface is rippling with curious dark bodies. "They're starving down there," he says. "I feel responsible, in a way. I need this place to be peaceful, but without the bugs there's nothing for them to eat. I feel like it's my fault."

Wayne is looking at him. Looking hard. Jack smiles to himself, crumbling stale bread in his hands, alight with the powerful knowledge that Bruce Wayne is looking, for a moment anyway, at only him. He's not sure where the allure of the idea comes from—he's never cared about celebrities (that he can remember) and he's never been one to chase money (that he can remember) and so he's not sure why it matters so much that it's _this man_ , specifically, who is taking him apart piece by piece with his eyes.

If he's going to be disassembled, he's more than happy to let Wayne do it.

"Are you," Wayne starts. He pauses, looks down as if he's not sure where the words are coming from, and then finishes less certainly, "are you getting help?"

"For what?" Jack asks.

Wayne gestures sharply at the place where Jack's gun is concealed. His mouth is a grim line.

"Oh!" Jack says, delighted now, "for _that?_ You're so kind to remember."

"It's a little hard to forget," Wayne says. "Most guys go their whole lives without someone threatening to blow his own brains out in front of them."

"Ah," Jack says. "I upset you. I'm sorry. Don't trouble yourself over it, though, what I do or don't do is no fault of yours. You're just sharing this bench with me."

Wayne's face is a riot of conflicting emotions, none of them pleased. He seems like he's struggling with himself. "No," he says, "no, you're right, it isn't."

"Anyways," Jack says, taking mercy on his companion, "I'm doing much better lately. It feels as if some kind of storm has passed, you know? I'm afraid it's probably only that I've wandered into the eye of it, but I'll take what I can get."

"Good," Wayne says, with a sincerity that appears to surprise him.

"You seem as stressed as ever," Jack continues, lightly. "Still haven't made your decision?"

Wayne looks away. "No."

There are no stars in Gotham, but the lights of the city are bright along the edge of the skyline. They're very nearly stars, for all that it really matters to earthbound humans. Jack split his bread into two and offers half to the billionaire on the park bench beside him.

"Here," he says. "Let me tell you a joke."

iii.

Wayne finds him at the butcher's shop. There's something haggard about him that Jack can't quite put a finger on, underneath the lovely sports coat and the impeccably styled hair. He thinks he can recognize it because he, too, has borne the brunt of awful nights. He smiles from behind the counter.

"What a coincidence," he says.

Wayne gets a blank look on his face that Jack somehow just _knows_ means this isn't a coincidence at all. He's never been so sure of anything.

"To what do I owe the unexpected pleasure?" he asks, leaning forward till he's practically on his toes.

"I," Wayne says. He runs a hand through his hair, only succeeding in making it look more elegantly disheveled. "Honestly, I don't know."

Funny that a busy man like Bruce Wayne would have the time to wander around on a whim, but then again, he did tell Jack that he wasn't running Wayne Enterprises anymore. And Jack understands restlessness. Always in the back of his mind there is the park, and the beautified new roads, and the alien streets of this aggressive, sleepless city.

"Well," Jack says, "my break's coming up. There's a coffee shop across the way I usually walk to. Local, you know, none of that generic disappointment in a cup."

Wayne clearly wasn't expecting to be so easily accepted. He seems to stall out, uncertain, reassessing his assumptions. It's charming. Jack thinks that he probably couldn't stop smiling if he tried, until he abruptly _does_.

"Jack!" his boss shouts, "get back here, I need you!"

Jack can feel himself curling inward, the smile dead on his lips.

"Jack?" Wayne echoes. He is probably just realizing they were never properly introduced.

For a moment Jack almost tells him that, no, officially his name is John Doe. Officially, he doesn't have a name. That would be the truth, and Jack has never thought of himself as a liar (that he can remember).

"Yes," he says, "absolutely. My name is Jack. Pleased to make your acquaintance."

Ten minutes later, they're seated at a table outside the tiny coffee shop where Jack goes to smell sugar and drink caffeine most days of the week. Someone remarked to him in the unemployment office that butcher's jobs are unpopular positions to be placed with—it's the blood, they said, you can't get away from the smell. Drives people crazy. The only time Jack has ever noticed the smell is when he comes back from the coffee shop. The scent of sugar gets all confused with the blood.

"You seem so…" Wayne says, "…so different around other people."

Jack drinks his coffee, understands now why Wayne was staring at him so hard in line while he was placing order with the barista. _Smaller_ , he knows. He feels smaller around people who aren't Bruce Wayne. It's as if Wayne is carrying around pieces of him that were carved off his bones a long time ago.

"They tell me I have trouble connecting to people," he says, peering over the rim of his cup.

"You seem… afraid," Wayne says. He sure doesn't sugar coat it, does he? It's not what you'd expect from a cosmopolitan playboy socialite. Maybe _he's_ different around _Jack_ , too.

"Well what about you," Jack says, "fess up. You look a wreck. What's going on with you?"

Wayne winces. "Things are—they're not going well with Julia."

"Wanna talk about it?"

"God no," Bruce says, with the first semblance of a smile that day. It makes Jack's heart ache.

"You know when you buy a pair of shoes," Jack says, propping up his chin on his hand, "all shiny and new, and you wear them a couple times, and suddenly they look like they've had the hell beaten out of them? And you think to yourself, what the heck, they were just new a month ago. They'll never last the year at this rate."

"Um," Wayne says. He's very handsome when he's confused. "I guess?"

"But they do last the year," Jack goes on, "they last more than a year. And they always look precisely as beat up as they did that first month in, no matter how hard you work them. Like they just needed to get that first bright and shiny layer scratched off, and now they're good for anything."

Jack points lazily with the hand that isn't holding him up. "That's you," he says. "You just need to break yourself in."

Wayne stares at him. "That is quite possibly the least complimentary metaphor I've ever been treated to," he says.

Jack kicks his shoes lightly, amused at the way Wayne freezes up in confusion at the touch.

"Better functional than glamorous," he says. "Don't you think?"

iv.

Jack hovers at the edge of the gate, not quite able to make himself go past that line and on to the rink. Bruce pauses a couple feet out on the ice, quirking his head like a dog suddenly scenting a strange animal. He spins, perfectly graceful.

"Jack," he says, "are you coming?"

Jack gives him a queasy smile. "Actually," he says, "I'm–I don't think this is such a good idea. I'll just wait for you out here."

Bruce frowns, looking honestly frustrated for the first time today despite the various trouble that Jack has already caused (spooking at the sight of buskers in Sesame Street costumes, knocking over a shelf of commemorative flasks on fifth avenue, getting dragged off by fake-Rolex salesmen under the bridge). He's not normally this bad, but with Bruce watching every little mistake seems amplified. Not to mention the people watching Bruce, while Bruce is watching him.

"You've already got your skates on," Bruce points out.

"Uh, Hahahah," Jack says, taking a wobbly step back. "Won't take a second to pull them off-"

Bruce glides back to the gate, his arms crossed over his chest. How does he do everything so gracefully? It's like he knows exactly what muscle is involved in every single motion. Jack doesn't even know how he gets himself out of bed some mornings.

"Are you worried about the crowd?" He asks.

"No," Jack lies.

"Are you worried about being embarrassed?"

"No…"

"So what's bothering you?" Bruce demands. Jack winces. He hates being the bucket of water on a good time, and right now he feels like that's all he ever is. He hardly ever gets to spend time with Bruce, who is a CEO and a philanthropist and a socialite and has precious few mornings to waste with nobodies like John Doe. If he isn't providing a good time, what incentive does Bruce have to come back and see him again?

"Nothing," Jack says, and tries to do a better job of smiling. He grabs the gate, steps off the wood and on to the ice–-and his feet immediately sweep out from under him. He stares up at the sky, icy grey, blankly judging him.

"Okay," he says, from the floor, "so I was hoping I was wrong about this but–-I don't think I ever learned how to skate."

Bruce blinks down at him a couple times, and then he laughs. His laughter is rich and bright and it makes him glitter like something precious and rare. Jack loves it when he laughs. It's worth falling down on a hundred skating rinks just to hear the way it rattles in his lungs. Bruce holds both his hands out, smiling in a way that makes it clear he's not trying to be malicious. That's okay, Jack wouldn't mind it if he was.

"That's all?" he says. His gloved fingers are reaching for Jack, his dark hair haloed against the glowing grey sky."You could have just said."

The haloing sky urges stilted, beautiful, ugly confessions to the tip of his tongue, but what Jack actually says is: "Just trying to keep up with you, superstar."

Bruce's hand closes around Jack's, and although all he can feel is pressure through the wool and leather, gravity might as well have realigned itself around them. He thinks he could just float right up into Bruce's grip.

"Well," Bruce says, with a grin, "would you like me to teach you?"

v.

"Is this a date?" Jack asks, while Bruce Wayne lifts two menus from the concierge's desk. Here in this beautiful room with its real crystal chandeliers, in his careworn white suit, Jack feels as high with the power of Bruce's attention as he does low and out of place, persistently like an intruder. It's a terrible clash of feelings. He doesn't know how his body is containing them both at the same time.

Bruce's hands stop cold over the pretty leather menus. They've been seeing each other, in the loosest sense of the words, for a while now, but this is the first time Jack's put him on the spot about it. The timing has a lot to do with how anxious and off-kilter Jack is feeling in this huge gorgeous reception area.

"Oh, relax," Jack says, preoccupying himself with straitening his jacket, his gloves. "You'd think I just put a gun to your back."

Bruce turns sharply, his eyes skating over the pockets of Jack's suit in a brief but pointed search for anything out of the ordinary. Jack sighs, makes a big show of turning out his pockets. The host comes back to seat them, while Jack's pockets are still on display, and he gets a dourly disapproving look for his trouble. Jack smiles brightly at the host until his back is turned, and then feels his whole expression sour on his face.

It really is an incredibly nice restaurant, for all that it's making Jack feel like a drawn and quartered heretic in some medieval woodcut. Their table is much more private than he expected, but then, Bruce is a more private person than might be expected, too. Jack chatters a bit, just to fill silence, although Bruce doesn't seem to be listening. It's fine. Jack half expects to be tuned out most of the time anyways. He just talks in case Bruce tunes back in.

"Yes," Bruce says, abruptly, cutting into a funny story about a mix up at the meat packing plant earlier that week.

"Yes what?" Jack asks.

"It is a date," Bruce says. His shoulders couldn't be more deliberately squared if he'd been stamped out of sheet metal. "Is that a problem?"

"A problem?" Jack laughs, throwing himself back in his chair. The legs creak a little. "Mr. Wayne, whatever gave you the impression I might have a problem with that?"

The man's lips twitch. "You can call me Bruce, you know," he says. "Most of my dates do."

"Ah ah ah," Jack says, "don't try to playboy me, Bruce Wayne. How many of your dates are beautiful unstable men who work in the glamorous meat processing industry?"

"So far one," Bruce says. He's clearly fighting not to smile.

"Let's keep it that way," Jack says. He flips open the menu, glances over it. He grimaces. "To be clear," he says, "this means you're paying, right?"

vi.

When Bruce takes his arm and introduces Jack as, "my boyfriend, the glamorous meat processing specialist," Jack nearly spits out his champagne.

This is the first event Bruce has taken him along to as a plus one, representing Wayne Enterprises in the three ring circus of Gotham High Society. Jack has spent a fair portion of the night labeling passersby as acrobats or jugglers or elephant trainers—it helps him not succumb to sheer class-based anxiety. Bruce had to hide his unattractive snorting behind a handkerchief when Jack elbowed him, pointed to the mayor, and whispered, "senior clown."

"Boyfriend!" the timber heiress says, her eyes flashing. "What a departure from your usual conquests."

That abruptly stalls him out. Jack, a conquest. He wants to shudder a little bit at the way that word takes him up and squeezes him, at the idea of himself as a country laid out, ravaged, and subdued under Bruce's unforgiving boot. He's offended on Bruce's behalf, but more than that he's shaken by the seductive power of that one, derisive word. It takes a moment to crank the engine back up, but he manages.

Jack smiles a little too widely at her and says, "Well, even Rome eventually had to tackle Britain."

The heiress's expression falters, her eyes fixed on his grinning lips, but her husband laughs and claps his hands together. "He's right you know," the big man says, "that's history for you. Didn't know you went in for brains, Brucey."

"Ah," Bruce says, shrugging modestly, "if I'm relegated to being the beauty, well then, you know…"

And they all share a hearty titter. Jack watches them through his champagne, feeling as if he's walking in a dream world where nothing is quite as it should be. Their bodies are distorted thin by the curvature of the glass, two dimensional people you could fold up and put away. In one moment he's distantly amused by the whole thing, in another moment he's so seethingly resentful that his own brain rebels against the force of foreign feeling. He tenses. Where is this coming from?

Bruce is smiling this patent-leather smile, shiny and artificial; is that where the resentment is coming from? He loves to see Bruce smile, he tucks each of Bruce's smiles away in his memory with the greatest care, but this isn't what he wants. This isn't at all what he wants.

Jack leans into Bruce, abruptly, placing a hand on his arm. "Ya mind if I borrow him?" Jack asks their fellow guests, with a chipper, secretive grin. "I get kinda jealous when I can't have him to myself, see."

The two of them escape to an unoccupied corner under the grand stairwell, not quite hidden from view but certainly out of sight enough to be, for a while, out of mind. They leave the discomfited heiress and her husband to their champagne. Jack crosses his arms, leans up against the wall.

"Boyfriend, huh?" he says. "Why wasn't I consulted in this decision?"

Bruce blinks at him, has the grace to look apologetic. "I thought it was assumed?"

Jack's lips twitch, and then he thinks, _why not_. He smiles. "Heck, I don't mind. Gave me a good shock though—are you sure you want all these nice folks to know you throw a party with an open guest list?"

Bruce shrugs, but something about the sharpness of the movement conveys that this is not a matter of apathy. "I won't tell everyone," he says, "just a few people that I trust to have the right reactions. They'll pass the word around as a rumor, and then anyone who wants to give us trouble will have to weigh the benefits against the consequences of publically addressing gossip. Society is a delicate balance between unspoken rules and engagement."

Some people would be upset that Bruce had planned this out for them, on their behalf. Jack can't bring himself to care about anything but how beautiful Bruce looks when he's planning, mapping his wheels within wheels. Bruce is a schemer. Jack supposes they're just lucky he uses his power benevolently.

And still, Jack is troubled. The Bruce standing in front of him is so different from the Bruce of that ballroom—out there, Jack feels like he's been left with an understudy of the man he adores, a dishonest facsimile. Who is that man? Why has he come here to stand between Jack and Bruce, blocking his light?

Déjà vu nauseates him all at once, makes him desperate for something solid to ground himself against. He reaches out.

"I want every part of you," Jack mutters, looping his fingers around Bruce's tie. For a white hot second he wants to hold and pull, to tighten the thing like a noose, and the urge echoes through his muscles even as he fights it down, too uneasy to analyze it. He'll be happy to shove it in a box at the back of his head with all the other disquieting impulses that come over him.

"Every part of me?" Bruce jokes, in that coy knowing way that he does for the ladies of the Gala. It makes Jack twitchy, as if a painting has been hung wrong in front of him and he just needs to _straighten_ the angle. He jerks Bruce closer.

"Where are you hiding the rest of you?" he murmurs, a frown pulling at his lips. "Where have you buried him?"

Bruce's expression flinches, a telltale flicker almost too quick to read, but Jack knows better than to believe the bemusement that settles into place there, the innocent concern. There is something underneath that pretty tanned skin, looking out at Jack through his boyfriend's wide blue eyes, something that Jack yearns to know. It is like being in love twofold, always eating and never satiated.

"This _is_ me," Bruce says, and Jack doesn't believe him.

Jack touches Bruce's cheek, draws him down into a kiss that's deep and slow and full of a yearning so powerful it borders on pain. If only he could see the rest of Bruce. If only he could see what Bruce was holding back, no matter how monstrous—perhaps, he thinks, it would put his own monsters to rest.

vii.

Alfred doesn't approve of him.

Jack lights up when he sees the man—he recognizes him immediately, although they've ever met. That's exactly what the Wayne family butler ought to look like. Jack couldn't have pictured it better if he'd had a whole day to sit down and sketch out ideas.

"Pleased to meet ya," he says, throwing out an open hand. "Unsung hero, the man who raised our darling Bruce Wayne!"

Alfred takes one look at him and goes rigid. Jack's hand remains empty, extended, for a moment before he reluctantly tucks it away into a pocket. "Yeesh," he mutters, "tough room."

"Master Bruce," Alfred says, turning sharply, " _this_ is who you're seeing?"

Jack shrinks back, probably couldn't be more hurt if he'd been physically kicked. He looks at Bruce too, and Bruce is pinned under the twin points of their equally anxious glares. Song as old as time, eh? The family and the boyfriend.

"Is there a problem?" Bruce says, with an edge that no one who knew him could mistake.

Alfred purses his lips and takes a moment to say anything at all. Finally, he replies, "Not—precisely. I'm sure he's… a fine… What did you say your name was, sir?"

"Uh, Jack," Jack says. He licks his lips. "Doe."

Whatever else he might be Alfred clearly isn't stupid. He knows. He sees right through the flimsy fantasy of "Jack" and right into the ugly truth of John Doe. On the day that Jack finally stumbles up the steps of the Pearly Gates, he hopes he doesn't get a look half as scorching as the look this manservant is currently giving him.

"And where did you meet," Alfred says, " _Jack_?"

"Alfred, I assumed you'd be _happy_ to see me doing well with someone."

Alfred looks away. "What about Jules," he says, but quietly, "you were happy with her."

Bruce gets this pained, bloodless look on his face. Jack can see his hands clenching in his pockets. "Me and Jules," he says, "it doesn't— _work_ , it's not what she needs, not with what I am—"

"What you _are?"_

" _What I was_ ," Bruce hisses.

Jack has turned his head so that he's making eye contact with the doorknob, staring resolutely at it without blinking. "Should I give you two some space?" he asks, both terrified and hopeful that the answer will be yes. He hates being excluded, not knowing this clearly vital secret, but he's not sure how much longer he can stand in the presence of Alfred without spontaneously combusting.

"Yes."

"No!"

The two men, a family of a sort, stare each other down. Jack gets the feeling they're communicating on a level that's almost entirely eye movements. It appears to be an eloquent language; they're certainly silent long enough to have exchanged a full conversation.

"Look," Jack cuts in, uneasily, "can we just establish whether this is a gay thing or some other kind of thing?"

"It is certainly _not_ a gay thing," Alfred replies. He still won't look away from Bruce.

"Well then what's the _problem?_ " Bruce says, picking up the slack like a seasoned interrogator.

Alfred's worry lines could scrub linens. "What do you _know_ about him, Bruce? Really?"

"His favorite movie is _Casablanca_ ," Bruce says, in a tone that could grind granite. "He's an assistant butcher at the oldest practice in Gotham. He speaks fluent French. Do you want me to go on?"

"I _mean_ ," Alfred says, "who are his family? Where does he come from? What does he want with you?"

"Why are you talking to me like I'm a fifteen year old going out on their first date?" Bruce demands. "I'm not a teenager and _you're not my father_."

Alfred says nothing. He stands as still as if rigor mortis had crawled up his sleeve and shut him down. Bruce is already sagging back, pale, as if he'd been the one who was figuratively slapped. Jack remembers—a feed of commentary his brain is supplying in real time—that Bruce can recall almost nothing after the age of twelve. Although Alfred had raised him alone in this drafty old house, Bruce is unable to remember those years, unable to touch that bond. Guilt persists in Bruce every time he looks at those family photos, the ones he had pointed out on the stairwell, of Bruce smiling with Alfred and a young man in the sunlight, in the countryside.

Jack sympathizes, as much as he can. There was no one waiting for _him_ on the other side.

"I'm sorry," Bruce says. If the look on Alfred's face is any indicator, this is no less startling than the preceding insult. "I didn't mean that. I'm just—hurt, that you won't give someone I love a chance."

"Someone you love?" Alfred echoes, even as Jack is mouthing the same words.

Bruce loves him? There's never been a doubt that Jack is drowning in love, as if that night on the freeway someone had injected heavy liquid into his lungs and left him to gasp onwards, but he hadn't dared to hope. He had been too afraid of having still more to lose in a life that always feels one missed step away from catastrophe. And yet, now that he has it, happiness consumes him _._ Lurking near the doorway of this room he is a wildfire raging completely unnoticed.

"Look," Bruce says, shifting uncomfortably, "we can talk about this later. Jack and I have a reservation at seven."

Alfred hesitates, and then he reaches out, stops Bruce. He gently turns his employer and adjusts his tie, tugging it just a fraction of an angle to the right.

"No," he says, without looking up, "if you love him, then there's nothing to talk about. I'll stand with whatever makes you happy."

Bruce relaxes just a little bit. "Thanks, Alfred."

Alfred offers him a wan smile, but as Bruce turns away, the expression sobers. He looks right at Jack, his eyes full of hard warning. The wildfire sputters and dies, the temperature around Jack seems to drop several degrees. Jack is suddenly, unpleasantly certain that Alfred has killed men before, and wouldn't be opposed to doing it again. When he and Bruce are standing at last on the front step of the manor, underneath the pale specter of stars—just far enough from Gotham for the sky to peer through—Bruce lets out a heavy breath.

"I wasn't expecting that," he says. "I'm sorry you had to experience it."

"Eh," Jack says, "people don't usually like me much. I'm used to it."

Bruce narrows his eyes at the gates in front of them. "You know that's not fair," Bruce says. "There's nothing wrong with you."

"From your lips to God's ears," Jack remarks, even as he tries to drown the cold feeling of dread that washes over him. Oh, there's so much more wrong than he likes to think about.

"I'll have to have a talk with him," Bruce is saying. He sounds like he'd rather be dipped in hot oil.

Jack looks up. Bruce is crumpled with worry, his shoulders hunched, his lips turned down. Blue and grey in the moonlight, beautiful despite the tension of his features. Here is the thing: Jack wants him to be happy. Jack wants him to be the person he is now, not—not whatever he used to be, what he imagines to be some amalgam of Gala Brucie and estranged son, a distant and unhappy creature. That Bruce could never have loved Jack. He would kill to protect this Bruce, to keep him. He thinks he might even _really_ mean that. In that thought, he feels a delicate thread of kinship with Alfred Pennyworth.

"Hey," Jack says, "Hey. You need your family. Family is the most important thing, right?"

"Yeah," Bruce says, scrubbing his hands across his face, "but this is important to me too."

"You don't have to choose," Jack says. He reaches out, takes Bruce's hands into his own. He offers the best reassuring smile that he can manage and kisses Bruce's wrists, one after the other. The skin there is warm.

He says, "I wouldn't ever want to make you choose."

viii.

It's deep into the night on an evening when things have been going well. So much so that Jack has made the mistake of assuming they will continue to go well forever. He forgets that he is living in the eye of a storm. He gets caught up in the pleasure of having what he wants, of being indulged. Happiness consumes him.

They're in Jack's apartment. Maybe this is the problem.

Bruce doesn't have his back to anything, he's supporting both their weights at once, effortlessly. Overwhelming desire screams through Jack, urging him to press closer, spread his thighs wider—perched on Bruce's lap with his tie undone he feels so much lighter than he should, like a doll you could toss effortlessly against the wall. He doesn't know why you would throw a doll against anything, but he can't help but imagine himself tossed, shaken by Bruce's powerful hands.

His knees are on either side of Bruce's hips but he wants to push himself closer, smear his whole being against that body. He kisses down into Bruce's mouth, panting and messy, and takes anything Bruce will give him. He grabs at everything, unable to keep his hands still, leaves four finger-shaped bruises over the bare skin of one pectoral. There's a heart there, he thinks in a daze. There's a heart in there.

"God," he says, into that mouth, "I want to—tear you open—touch this—touch—"

This room is a terrible place, a nightmare place, with blue neon lighting up the slats of the blinds and the shadows at the corners of the ceiling swarming over their bodies, a place that won't allow him to sleep. This room is the nest of bugs beneath the surface of a lake, this room is the bottom of the abyssal plain, and Jack has filled it with evil for months. It's seeped out of him while he slept, sunk beneath the bed and hid there. Yes, obviously. He should have realized sooner.

What is Bruce saying? It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, as long as he's here with Jack in this awful room in the dark and the blue neon, things that suit Bruce Wayne better than any bespoke tailored piece.

Jack pushes him down. There's a flash of surprise on Bruce's face—Jack shouldn't be able to do that, he isn't strong enough, shouldn't be—that's swallowed up by desire, and _that._ That long awaited confirmation that Bruce wants him, wants only him, he's dreamed of this since before he was born, came into the world hungering to sit in the white hot spotlight of Bruce Wayne's desire. He moans, desperate for more, spreads his legs so wide that his hips ache beautifully.

He's terrified by his own hunger, how good it feels, how it makes him say things that any reasonable person would die rather than say. He's invincible, all powerful, sitting atop this man.

" _Je t'aime_ ," he mutters, wretchedly, " _je te hais_ —"

"Jack," Bruce says, and Jack is just barely present enough in his own mind to register tones of worry. He ignores them. He kisses everything he can get his mouth on, dipping down to reach neck and shoulders with his teeth. "Jack," Bruce says again, "wait—"

Jack finds his chin in the strong grip of Bruce's fingers, immobilized. He licks his lips as he finally pauses in his frantic motion.

"Where are you?" Bruce says.

 _I'm here_ , Jack wants to say, but of course that isn't true. He's here and not here, a ghost possessing his own trembling frame, two page-flicks upwards in the book of the universe where this room is the dark cavern of the sea, similar and not, and he feels that if he could look up fast enough he would catch the silver tails of deep sea monsters as they swam through the walls.

"I don't know," he whispers.

"Tell me what you're feeling right now," Bruce says, softly, taking Jack's face in both hands. Jack leans into them, his eyes fluttering closed.

"Uh," he says, "I'm, I'm pretty turned on right now. Distant. Afraid? Dizzy?"

"I don't think we should go any farther," Bruce says, gently. "You're not yourself."

" _No_ ," Jack whines, desperately, nails biting into flesh. "No, please. If you stop now I'll—"

If you stop now I'll die, he doesn't say. He's irrationally, horribly certain of this, but he's just self-aware enough to know that it might sound like a threat. So he doesn't say anything, he just chews his lip until it splits.

Bruce at least looks like he's taking Jack's terror seriously. After a moment, he reaches up and carefully pulls Jack down, onto the bed. When Jack's back is flat against the sheets, he comes slipping over and lies half on top, rests the flat of his hand against the sharp dip of pelvic bone.

"I'm here," he says. And he is. His body is heavy, solid and hot over Jack's oversensitive skin, his weight is the only anchor holding Jack down to this city. In moments like these, Bruce is the only real thing in the whole cardboard world.

"I have got to get a new apartment," Jack manages, cracking a pale smile to show that this is, trying to be, a joke.

Bruce looks around. "Is the room upsetting you?"

"No," Jack says. "Yes," Jack says. He stares at the ceiling, uncertain if he's smiling or not. He thinks he is. "I'm afraid it's not the room."

"Why?" Bruce asks, ever patient.

Jack swallows. He is certain now that he's smiling. "Because if it's not the room," he says, "then it must be me."


	2. watch your feet, let me pass

i.

Jack wakes up at five and walks to the butcher's shop where he has been assigned meaningful and valued employment, as part of the Wayne fund's community outreach program in the wake of the Joker Toxin cataclysm. He's almost absurdly grateful for it, because the work keeps his body occupied during the endless days until—hmm. Until what?

He pauses, his key pressed up against the lock but not quite hard enough to slip inside. This is his life. These days will continue for as long as he lives, more or less the same, with small variations depending on his modest choices. He slides the key inside and unlocks the shop, hanging his hat on the rack by the door. He's more or less given up on being identified at this point, of reclaiming some unremembered older life; the harried police woman had told him point blank, as they reviewed his case, that if no one had come forward by now then no one likely ever would. There is no _until_ waiting for him. Except maybe for the one that awaits everybody.

He slips his gloves into his jacket and hangs that on the rack too. The shop is dark, except for one square of floor lit the thin red color of sunrise. He puts off turning on the lights for a while; he brings out the display wares, sweeps, primes the gumball machines for one free gumball the next time someone tries to turn the coinslot, and he carries in the shipment of wrapping paper from the stack out back. Then his boss arrives at seven, precisely, and orders him to turn the lights on pronto. So he slinks out from behind the counter and flips all the switches, blinking at the burn of white florescent.

His boss is a medium sized man, but he seems to fill the back room like an expanding gas fills a container. Jack understands implicitly that he's been hired because the boss doesn't like to waste time on the fiddly customer service stuff when he could be doing real work. This, of course, means that what Jack is doing must not be real work. Jack's pretty okay with that, considering his other options are unemployment or a desk in a cubical.

At 8 AM, Judy Faragasso comes in with her order for the Bordeaux family, as usual. She slides it across the counter, but draws her hand away just a little too fast, as if she's afraid to linger where he could reach for it at any moment.

"How're you keeping?" she asks him. He can see a web-thin strand of hot glue on her bracelet, from where she's fastidiously repaired some fallen crystal.

"Oh, pretty well," he tells her with a smile. He always smiles at work, even on his worst days. He doesn't find it hard. "How's Mrs. Bordeaux?"

As he bends down to retrieve some bacon from the case, he can see her shoes shifting uneasily through the glass. She says, "You know how she is. She wants things a certain way."

On the slip of paper, in Mrs. Bordeaux's handwriting, each item is followed by at least one line of instructions re: the packaging and quality of the requested items. Today she has requested exactly thirteen (13) strips of bacon each packaged in groups of three with exception for the last one, which should be individual. He's never met the woman, but he has some idea, yes.

"Do you think you'll work for her forever?" Jack asks, as he comes up again.

"Well, I," Judy starts. She shifts her purse to the other shoulder. "No, not forever, probably. Could you bag those for me, there's too much today to fit it all in my purse like I usually do."

Jack obliges. Judy makes hurried little observations about the traffic and his progress and the Bordeaux house until he's finished ringing her up, at which point she bids him farewell and trots out of the shop without a backwards glance. Jack watches the bell over the door as it jingles shut, chin in hand above the display counter. He knows better than to try and open a dialogue with the customers now, but he still tries from time to time. Part of him finds pleasure in watching their uneasy withdrawals, the way you might tongue the open wound of a newly pulled tooth just to feel the tangy ache of it.

A few more regulars pass through, but he doesn't really try to talk with anyone else. The bell above the door rings at ten, and he turns around with a smile to find himself greeting Commissioner Jim Gordon, in the flesh. The smile freezes brittle on his face.

Gordon is examining the coat rack, looking more tired than anything else, but Jack's heart is cold with dread. It comes through him like it's in his veins, and he'd like nothing more than to get _out_ of here, rip off the apron and throw himself through the back door or the window if necessary, but he needs this job and if he runs out now the boss will never let him back in. So he clutches the top of the case and steadies himself while Gordon is pulling off his coat.

"How can I help you," Jack says. His teeth click against each other in a way that he's never noticed before.

Gordon looks up. He's—well he's got a haircut that would look more suited on a man half his age, but it does actually make him look younger. If it weren't for the heavy sleeplessness of his skin, Jack might actually say overall it's a good look for him. Jack has never met the man before, but he's a landmark. He's an institution. In Gotham there's this whole cast of local celebrities, most of them infamous, and he's heard plenty of customers chatting in low tones about The Commissioner and What He's Going to Do About All This Business. People seem to like him, for the most part.

"Oh," Gordon says, waving him off, "I'm not shopping. I'm on the clock. Do you have a moment to answer some questions?"

The back window is feeling _really_ inviting, but Jack just nods. "Say, uh," he starts, "aren't you a little high on the foodchain to be doing this kind of grunt work?"

Gordon gives him a sharp little look. It's the first time that Gordon has actually looked at him—at him, not at his clothes or his distinguishing features. The sharp look morphs into a flicker of uncertainty, and then he steps forward, leaving his coat on the rack.

"Have we met before?" Gordon asks him.

Jack's heart stutters in his chest, heavy and painful and flooding his throat with tight panic. He needs to say something because if he doesn't then how's _that_ going to look, he's got to say something fast, but the longer he chokes on his own closing windpipe the worse and worse everything he could say will sound.

"Relax," Gordon says, brows furrowing in what could be concern. "You're not a suspect or anything. I'm canvassing the whole block."

"I," Jack says. He smiles around his gritted teeth, leaning over the case for better balance. "S-sorry. I—"

"Relax," Gordon repeats. "I've seen it before. I'm not gonna slap some handcuffs on you because you stuttered too much."

Jack takes a deep breath. Then two. He's not entirely sure he believes that, but the lack of immediate violence is helping. As he's forcibly coming back to himself, he thinks of Bruce. He thinks of Bruce's weight in the darkness, his hands, his voice. He wishes Bruce were here. He survived for months without Bruce and he knows he can do it again now, but boy would it be nice if he didn't have to. Gordon offers him a tissue, and self-consciously Jack blots at the saliva that's pooled around his lips while he was panting into the glass.

"Don't like cops?" Gordon asks him, with a wry smile.

Jack looks up, mouth hidden behind the blossom of tissue paper. He feels a little safer this way, with his mouth hidden, but he also doesn't like how that question puts him on the spot.

"It's alright," Gordon says. "There's lots of people in this city who have a bad history with the boys in blue. It's been ugly in this town for a long time, much longer than any of those costumed jokers have been around."

Jack doesn't think that's it, that he's had some sort of terrible awful run in with the police and just can't remember it. Of course it's _possible_. But that seems like it would feel clear and angry and certain, and all he feels is guilty and small. All he feels, really, is more of this same terrible looming sense that something is about to go very very wrong. The tip of the sword grazing his neck as it swings over him.

"That was before my time," Jack says, truthfully. "I've only been living here for a little while."

"Ahhh," Gordon says. His smile is softer now, friendlier. "That explains it."

"Explains… what?"

Gordon leans up against the case, his eyes settling on a middle distance that seems to be brimming with troubling memory. Jack can see his age better now than ever before.

"It's hard enough for even the ones who were born here," Gordon gives Jack a look that's more pity than anything else, "then there's guys like you."

"Like me," Jack echoes.

"New blood," Gordon says, and then he winces. "Sorry. I don't mean to sound like I'm soothsaying your doom or anything. Christ, I know I used to have people skills. Can't figure when I lost them all."

"No…" Jack says, slowly. He looks out the window, to the black pavement glinting in the sun—in Gotham they cut the asphalt with glass. "No, I know what you mean. You can't make Gotham a home if you're just… flesh and blood. It doesn't belong to us."

"Well, that's what we're fighting to change, I guess." Gordon opens his notebook, effectively closing down that line of conversation. "I won't take long, I just have some questions about what you've observed in the area over the last day."

Gordon asks him some questions about his customers, what he's seen on the sidewalks outside, any rumors he might have picked up, a few incomprehensible questions that sound more like they should come from a ghost hunter than a policeman. Jack has heard a rumor that Gordon has something to do with the Batman. He spends most of the interview looking for a sign—he doesn't know what kind—of the bat in this tired bag of nails. There's something tough in there, no doubt, but somehow Jack doesn't feel like it's _batman._

Gordon flips closed his notepad as if the motion takes about all the energy he has left. Those weren't the answers he hoped for, probably.

"You, uh, gonna be alright out there, chief?" Jack asks, licking the dryness from his mouth.

Gordon looks up again. There's that same flash of scrutiny—is it recognition? Did they used to know each other? But Jack's caseworkers are so certain that he hadn't been living in Gotham for long before the accident, when would they have had the time?

It's not just his caseworkers, apparently. Even Gordon can smell how out of place he is, small and alone in this huge city.

"Hey, I'll be fine," Gordon says. "Takes more than some old fashioned footwork to knock me out."

Jack doesn't mention that sending a high level police official out on street duty sounds a lot like a bid to get him into an early and permanent retirement, but there's a tension in Gordon's smile that says he probably knows it anyhow. The older man takes his coat off the rack with heavy, blunt movements and then turns back to Jack, his arm halfway down his sleeve.

"You take care of yourself," he says. "It's hard enough for us little guys, getting by. Don't make it any worse than it has to be."

Jack presses his tissue tightly against his lips again. People always seem to be looking at his mouth. He's decided he wants Jim Gordon to look him in the eye. "Thanks," he says.

There's precious little kindness in this city, and cop or no cop, Gordon's alright in his book.

After that, the shop hits the doldrums. There's no work to be done inside, so Jack pulls his hat on—it's a little old fashioned of him, but he burns like rice paper in the sun—and steps outside to sweep off the sidewalk.

Down the way, some neighborhood kids are playing a game with a red ball that practically clangs every time it bounces up off the pavement. There's an empty lot there, even though half the time they seem to be using the street as an outfield. He watches for a while, looking up from his sweeping now and then, as the kickers cycle through. He likes kids pretty alright. The ones at the center where Bruce volunteers never seem to have a problem with him the way adults do, although when Bruce is in the room they don't particularly care about anyone else. Jack can sympathize with that.

The ball goes wide this time, ricocheting off the top of a parked car and singing right over the intersection. Without thinking much about it, Jack takes a couple steps to the right and puts up his hands, and the ball sails right into them. He blinks down at it. The things his body does constantly startle him.

"Hey!" one of the kids calls. She barely takes a look down the road before she hops across it, probably nine years old and apparently bulletproof.

"Hey," he says back.

He smiles. She doesn't seem to mind. She holds out her hands, wordlessly.

"I feel like there should be a please in here somewhere," he muses.

The girl keeps her hands out. She's dishwater blond and wearing cleats that could probably aerate concrete. He thinks he's seen her around before. "Give it back or I'll put a hit out on you."

"Uh." Jack continues holding onto the ball, although he kind of doesn't want it now. "You must have a lot of money for a third grader."

She doesn't crack. "Tom says his brother works for the Penguin and we can all have as many people shot as we want."

Jack takes a look at the kids milling in the empty lot. He doesn't know for sure, but he's pretty sure that the gang grunt families don't hang out in this neighborhood. It's a gut feeling. These kids are all solidly bourgeois. His common sense belatedly starts to catch up with his bewildered logic center.

"Ah," Jack says. "I… can see you're well connected. Here." He drops the ball into her still-waiting hands. "I don't think the Penguin is the scariest thing in this city though. Tom might want to come up with something better."

"My cousins say the Joker is dead," the girl informs him, a non sequitur that stumps him for a moment and then, to his unease, clicks into place. "My cousins say if he didn't come back to finish things then Batman must have left him in a sewer somewhere."

"Er," he says, "well, hopefully they're right."

She nods, serious as a heart attack, and then skips off just as a slick black car comes idling up to the curve, pausing in its tracks to let her pass. This city is as brutal as it is bizarre.

Kids, he thinks. They _are_ the future…

The slick black car pulls up against the curb, and Jack is watching it out the corner of his eye in case something awful is lurking there. But all that happens is that Bruce Wayne pops up over its roof. Jack hides his face behind his hand and laughs at himself for nearly swooning while Bruce waves at him and smiles and is basically perfect in every way. The sun was already out, but suddenly it really _feels_ like it.

"Surprise!" Bruce calls. "Can I take you to lunch?"

Jack's heart sinks a little. He'll have to ask the boss. Not that the boss is likely to say no, it's just… _asking_. He'd rather talk to another policeman. Okay, that isn't true, he would not.

"There's this little place in oldtown I think you'll like," Bruce is saying, as he locks his car behind him. "Andrew's? I want to be the first person to take you there."

One side of Jack's smile pulls higher than the other. "You're the only one who takes me anywhere, Mr. Wayne."

"Oh, we'll fix that eventually," Bruce says, with the easy confidence of a man who's been welcome everywhere since the day he was born. It's nice. It's almost infectious.

Bruce follows him into the shop and hovers like a good luck charm in the door while Jack negotiates for an hour off, sweating despite the fairly cool spring. The boss gives in with a couple meaningful little disapproving noises, but he gives in all the same. Bruce hooks an arm around Jack's hip as they leave the shop, and whoever Julia is or was, Jack has no earthly idea how she gave this up.

They park in the closest space they can find, which is about two blocks down at this time of day, and Bruce helps him out of the car like an absolute gentleman. It's a nice part of town and reserved, in a masculine businessy kind of way, but Jack is still reluctant to let go of his hand.

They've been dating for a month, and Jack still feels sort of like he's breathed in some mind altering poison cloud and is hallucinating every time Bruce shows up in the daylight. In Gotham, it's less unlikely than you might think. Everything is less unlikely in Gotham.

Specks of glass flash in the pavement that runs along beside them, as they walk. It's nearly blinding when the sun is this high.

"Isn't it funny how it glitters?" Jack says to Bruce, a hand above his eyes as he peers at the asphalt stretched on ahead.

"Funny?"

"In a city like Gotham," Jack explains, twisting a hand towards nothing in particular. "How poor and loud and ugly this place is, but the streets! Mmm, in the new world the streets are paved with diamonds. All that wealth buried in pitch, where no one can touch it."

"It's only glass," Bruce tells him.

"Ah, it's the _look_ of the thing. You know the first ones were put down outside Wayne Corp, did you have anything to do with that? Part of your glamorous public image?"

"I don't remember," Bruce admits. His frown comes and goes, insubstantial. "But it's a good way to recycle the windows that are always breaking around here, and I'm not surprised the city wants to cut costs with the way criminals tear up the streets on a monthly basis."

As they pass underneath the shade of an ancient overhang, part of a hotel probably as old as the street, Jack grabs the black rod of a lamp post and swings over a patch of pavement. He lands with a showy little flair on the other side and turns back, delighted with the panache of that move, to find Bruce frowning again. Bruce looks down at the square of concrete between them, a little darker than the ones on either side.

"How did you know to do that?"

"Do what?" Jack asks, his smile fading.

"Skip this." Bruce toes the edge of the square with one beautiful loafer, and the rubber of his sole immediately begins to bubble. "Have you walked this way before? We don't have to eat here if you've already been."

Jack feels like a bit of a country bumpkin, staring wide-eyed at the bubbling rubber, but he can't seem to help it. "I, um," he says, "I didn't. It just seemed… like the thing to do?"

Bruce gives him a long look and then steps carefully over the pavement. It would be easier to just go around it (Jack imagines that's what most people do), but Bruce rarely ever goes around things and this is no different. He stops beside Jack, who is still staring at the ground behind them, and considers him for a moment in silence. There are no cars. A little ways ahead, a gaggle of senators are unpacking from a hallway they shouldn't all have been able to fit inside.

"Jack," he says, "I know your case workers all think you must have been visiting here from somewhere else when the accident happened, but— Have you considered—"

He stops, like he's not sure whether it might be bad luck to say this out loud. Jack knows, Jack feels the tug of uneasy balance too.

"You might be from Gotham?" Bruce finishes, at last. He shrugs, self-conscious of the anti-climax in his announcement. But for Jack it's not anti-climactic at all. It's like a slow, crashing disaster he can't seem to get out from underneath. This alien, resentful city, with its strange citizens and its secret languages, his _home?_ To be lost in an unfamiliar land would be one thing, but to be lost in your own home?

Jack looks down at his shoes. They're black on white leather, rusty with dried viscera around the instep, and suddenly he feels sick. It comes like panic in his stomach, dizziness, his mouth watering with a sweetness that signals disaster.

"Hey," Bruce says, taking his shaking shoulders, "hey, Jack, talk to me? What's going on?"

Jack does nothing but swallow for a whole minute, until the worst of the sickness passes. At first he thinks that he's still dizzy because his vision is all blurred, but then he realizes that's only his eyes watering. He takes a shaky breath.

"Sorry," he manages.

"Shhh, no," Bruce says, drawing him forward into an embrace. Gosh, Bruce is huge. Jack is a tall guy, but Bruce is… _encompassing_. "What do you need?"

"Just a minute," Jack says. He laughs, but it's wet and it's not very enthusiastic. "Gee, if Arkham wasn't such a, heh, madhouse, I'd have them check me in."

"You've got a brain injury," Bruce says, severely. "Whatever you're implying, don't."

Jack is thinking that if a brain injury was all he had wrong with him, it ought to have stopped making him sick by now. He doesn't want to tell Bruce anything else, though, because Bruce loves him (he shivers into the man's dress shirt) and Bruce would want him to see a doctor, and Jack just—just _can't_. Bruce has already been on him to see somebody about his anxiety. _What's the worst that could happen_ , Bruce had asked him. _I'm committed and I never see sunlight again_ , Jack replied, still flipping pancakes.

Bruce hadn't liked that answer. Jack insisted it was a joke, but some part of him—the anxious part? The paranoid part?—can't stop feeling like he's only surviving by the grace of a system that doesn't know about him yet. It's the part of him that panics at the sight of a badge. If he's discovered, everything will catch up with him at once in a single terrible lunge.

Here, now, Bruce tucks Jack's chin into his hand and says, "Do you still want lunch? We can go if you're not up to it."

They _could_ go, but. Where is he going to go, home? To his grim apartment? Back to the shop? No. No, anywhere with Bruce is by far preferable to any other place.

"Hey," he says, rapping Bruce's solid chest with his knuckles, "I'm the life of the party. I can go anywhere."

Bruce pulls back. They're getting looks from the gaggle of senators, but this is oldtown Gotham and apparently nobody likes to be direct about anything in these circles. Bruce has made it clear he doesn't care one way or another, but for Jack it's just another grating reminder that he doesn't belong anywhere. Doesn't belong in his grim little apartment, doesn't belong in his boss's old family business, doesn't belong here on this glittery street with a Wayne holding him slightly too close for anyone's approval.

Doesn't belong in Gotham. Can't leave Gotham. Doesn't belong anywhere.

Jack swallows it down with practice and no little bit of effort. He stays steady until they reach the restaurant, and then for a while he's too busy listening to Bruce rhapsodize about the hamburgers to worry too much about anything.

ii.

At four, the glitter of pavement outside goes dark all at once and he peers out through the glass, up past the tops of buildings, to where a swarm of bodies so small they appear to be a single rain cloud at first are blotting out the sun.

The customer beside him swears, fast and breathy over and over like a mantra, as she abandons everything but her car keys and shoots out the front door. He glances down at the steaks she's left on the ground. They're still wrapped. He picks them up and brings them back to the refrigerator, while the sounds of car alarms and distant sirens pick up outside. There's a faint buzzing out there too, getting louder.

"Boss?" he calls into the back, over the sound of the processor.

His boss lifts his head, scowling. "Jacky, I'm workin' here. Do your job."

"No, no," Jack says, shredding a piece of wrapping paper under his uneasy fingers. "It's not a customer problem. We've got a supervillain headed this way, by the look of it?"

Boss turns off the processor. He wipes his hands off on his apron, utterly silent, and then pushes out past Jack into the front. The air outside has only grown darker, and the buzzing is louder too.

"Shut the blinds," Boss says, at last. "Lights off." He flips the sign in the door to _closed_ as he says it. "You been in a hold-up before?"

Hold up, Jack has learned, includes everything from bank robbery to alien invasion around here. He shakes his head.

"Lucky you," Boss says. "Better not make this your first time. I'm going out the back and I'm driving home. I'll be back tomorrow to tally up the damages. Do what you want, but don't go out on that street until the sky clears up. I expect you in by nine if the shop's still standing."

His boss isn't a bad man. Jack watches him go, his heavy shape blocking the light through the back door and then disappearing behind white metal. He's harsh and unfriendly and he makes Jack jumpy just by narrowing his eyes, but he's not a bad man. Jack's guess is that he's been held up one too many times. It's a city that isn't kind to its street level citizens, the flesh and blood ones who bleed and die on the glassphalt. That's what Commissioner Gordon meant. Jack understands.

Jack turns back to the window. All the glitter has died down now, leaving just the black tar. Should he leave? He hasn't got a car, but he knows enough to guess that cars aren't always that much of a help, when you've got three blocks of people all trying to leave at once, and anyways a big enough monster could tip a car without much trouble. His other options are cowering here in the dark with the frozen meats for what could well be the next few hours, or begging anyone who hasn't already taken off to give him a ride. The latter is, if he's honest, set on bad odds. The way people just don't seem to take to him? In an already panicked situation, he doesn't think he's likely to do any better. And the other option…

He lifts his coat from the rack, examines his gloves for a moment. Jack has been living in a haze of ebbing and waning fear since he woke up in that hospital bed with the unfamiliar needle buried in his wrist, has known the sick frothy crests of anxiety and the black certainty of despair, but somehow, he's not afraid of this. Jack pulls on all his things and buttons up his coat. He's afraid of cops and the dark and his boss, and he's afraid of tomorrow, but he's not afraid of this.

Jack walks out into the street, as dark again as it was this morning when he arrived, and looks up at the sky. Between the thousands of tiny bodies, there are flickers of light.

He turns when he hears a sound like metal clanging against stone, and he follows it back to the abandoned lot where the kickball game was going on earlier. There's a stack of ripped up planks lying against the wall at the back, and as he circles it he can see a small tennis shoe sticking out from underneath it.

"That's not going to protect you," he informs it, "that wood is basically rotten."

"We're not going!" a small voice shouts back. "Damn off!"

Jack has no idea what to say to that. Instead, he walks around the side and peers underneath the rough triangle of coverage. There's three of them down there, and it's the girl from before who's got the others crouch behind her like a protective mother bird. Jack has a hazy idea that children are not usually this altruistic, and so he considers himself appropriately impressed.

"Kiddo," he says, "you oughta get home."

One of the crunched up little ones wails that it's too far, and the other one wails that they can't, and then they're just wailing for the heck of it like a couple of fog horns. Jack jams a pinky in one ear to mitigate the sudden spike of noise.

"Blondie," he says, looking at the girl. "You got a home to go to?"

"I'm not going," she says. "They're my reading buddies and that means I have to take care of them."

Jack doesn't bother to ask what the most holy institution of reading buddies entails exactly. He offers a hand into the darkness, his glove white against the shadows. "Okay, well don't hang around under this death trap. I'll unlock the shop for you and you can all hide in there."

They're not budging. He puts on his best neutral face and adds, "If it turns out to be zombies, you're gonna want some walls between you and them."

That gets them moving. He helps them out one by one and then points them at the butcher's shop, trailing behind as they tumble across the grass and over the street. He looks up again, as they go. Best as he can tell, it's concentrated above their block, which explains why the road is so ghostly empty. The dim but thick cacophony of horns is spread around them like the eye of a tornado, where the population has emptied itself outward.

As the last kid stumbles through the door, the buzzing takes on a new pitch. He pauses with his key in his hand, and it's as if he has stepped out of the self of this morning and into a dream world, where everything is just similar enough to be uncanny. There's something bubbling inside of Jack, silvery as mercury, and it takes him a moment to realize that it's serenity. Everything is different now, in this ghost town under this roiling sky—he's still driving, so to speak, but the roads have changed beneath him. He pulls the door to, slowly, and locks it, as the shriek of the living atmosphere reaches an improbable crescendo. There's a soft thud behind him.

He turns to find Scarecrow stepping down from the swarm, with something like the monster offspring of an ambulance and Frankenstein's laboratory just behind him. _Scarecrow—_ Jack knows the name without thinking. Of course, Scarecrow is one of those giants astride the earth, and everyone in this town knows his name or else learns it fast. With the grotesque sackcloth over his head, who else could he be?

"Ooh, look," the monster says, "a civilian."

This is the moment that Jack expects his deferred panic to finally crash in. He's had two attacks already today, not a record bad but pretty high, and like lightning strikes, they just seem to attract each other. And yet—nothing. Jack lifts his hand, curiously, making a fist and then opening it again. Nothing. He reminds himself that he could die here.

But Scarecrow doesn't care to kill people in cold blood, not unless he has to. Jack is certain of this, too.

"Afternoon," he says. "Welcome to the neighborhood." He pockets his keys.

Scarecrow sidles closer, the wicked injectors of his gloves' fingertips tracing through the air like the curl of a predator's tail. "Thank you," he says.

There's a terrible, strange moment when the words pop into Jack's head. He knows just what to say, how to turn, if he wants to get out of here in one piece. The trick is to be boring, unafraid, and waste no time—if giant lizards latch onto movement, then villains latch on to demonstrations of personality. It would be relatively simple to turn and walk away, and probably that would be the end of it, but the strange thing—the terrible thing—is that his mouth is already moving. It's still him driving, but the roads on the map all seem to lead to the same destination.

"What brings a swell fella like you to a place like this?" Jack asks, smiling brightly.

"I'm testing new… equipment," Scarecrow says, inching a little closer. "What about you, hm?"

Jack looks up at the buzzing sky. "Closing up shop," he says, "neighborhood's coming down with a roach problem, heh."

"You don't seem to be particularly bothered by them," Scarecrow observes.

"Guess not. You'll get me next time, kid, don't you worry."

Scarecrow breaks off, pacing left like a circling cat. If he keeps up like that, he's going to end up behind Jack, which isn't a problem except that behind him is where the door is, too. Jack feels his hand twitch in his pocket—the keys jingle against themselves. It's such a little thing, but Scarecrow's head snaps down towards the sound.

"What are you protecting?" he says, tilting his head as he goes.

"Ah, you got me," Jack sighs. "There's about fifty bucks in the register."

Scarecrow dips his head in closer, and at this distance the milkiness of his eye-filters is a glittering solid white. That mask must be airtight, underneath the canvas. "Do you think me a petty criminal?" he demands.

"I might call you a criminal," Jack responds, tapping his chin with one gloved finger. "Now, _petty_? I don't know you that well."

Scarecrow stops. Every little movement of his prowl halts, unnaturally still, and then he reaches out one hand ever so slowly. The needle tips of his fingers scrape Jack's jaw.

"It's you," Scarecrow says, "isn't it."

"Sure it's me," Jack says, puzzled. "Who's that, though?"

Even as he says it, the impact of that phrase is starting to make its way down into the part of his brain that isn't running on autopilot. The implication—out of everyone in this city, _Scarecrow_ recognizes him? The first little bubble of panic pops in his gut.

"It _is_ you," Scarecrow says. His voice isn't mild anymore. "Did you think a _palette swap_ was going to fool me? Do you think me an idiot?"

Jack makes a little spinning gesture with his fingers. "Let's rewind here, how do I know you?"

Scarecrow grabs his chin and _squeezes_. The injector tears open his skin and jams against his bone, and he can feel something hot trickling down from the grind of pain. Gee, he hopes it's just blood.

"But you don't know me," Scarecrow is murmuring, twisting his grip for a better look. "So this is what's left of you, then." He switches his grip, one hand around Jack's throat now and the other prying the corner of his lips upward, needle talons scraping gums. He seems to be comparing the view with another in his mind.

Jack makes a wary noise, but that's about all he can articulate like this.

"Were you that afraid of death?" Scarecrow muses, tugging at the flesh. "Afraid enough to survive like this?"

Jack's mind is running fast and getting nowhere. He doesn't want to _know._ He had told Bruce, at the pond on that first night they met, that he didn't want to go back. Part of him had still wondered, and maybe that was the thing that made it so scary—that he kept picking at the question, and soon it was going to bleed awfulness onto everything he had struggled to rebuild. He kept asking, and he doesn't want to know, but he keeps asking and he keeps being relieved when no one can tell him anything, and he keeps being disappointed too.

"Look at you," Scarecrow says. "You used to own this city."

Jack thinks, inanely, of Bruce's shoe. The bubbling rubber. The poison cement that they all just lived over, going on with their lives.

"I wonder what makes a thing like you tick," Scarecrow murmurs. The black liquid in the injector hisses through the needle, down out of sight. "I wonder what you're _afraid_ of."

Jack claws at the hands clutching him but his gloves have nothing to claw with. His eyes water, his tongue tastes like blood and bleach. He staggers back as he's dropped, smearing at his lips and chin, eyes wide. There's weight in his pocket, and then he catches the jingle of his keys as they flash up into Scarecrow's palm. Oh no, no no no no.

"So," he manages, spitting blood and saliva. "Petty after all?"

"Hardly," Scarecrow replies. "But I've never met a man who would sacrifice his sanity for fifty dollars."

A list of things that Jack can hear: the swarm of insects ( _are_ they insects?) above them, the soft click of a lock unlocking, his heartbeat in his eardrums, the scuff of boots as they slide over a threshold. He struggles to detangle them from each other as he pants, one knee planted in the concrete. The world is full of so much noise and so much light and all of it is a single snarled unit clinging to him, dragging at him, the strange amber sky and the dirt that glitters like diamonds when light flickers over it.

Boots, boots, why is that sound of boots important—

Jack comes up, unsteady on his feet and grasping at nothing. He is thinking about a day maybe two months before, a single moment on repeat that begins and ends with Bruce's smile in a perfect loop—the youth center, there is a drawing of a flower in his hand, Bruce's smile, these images are out of order and repeating in kaleidoscopic patterns—this is the day that Bruce tells him about the past he can't remember. The parents he can't recall saying goodbye to. This is the moment (smile) that Bruce turns to him and says, you understand what I'm doing here, don't you (smile)?

Jack is not a hero. Jack is a nervous wreck who can't even qualify for a driver's license, a coward, a no name nobody, but (there's always a but, there's always always a _but_ isn't there) he knows that Bruce is never going to forgive him if he doesn't do something _now_ , and a world without Bruce is a world he no longer knows how to contemplate, and besides. Death has never really been the thing he's afraid of (that he can remember).

It's kind of euphoric, the conclusion. What's the worst that can be done to him now? He staggers across the sidewalk and into the dark, hand slamming against the doorway for support. Everything is fuzzy. He giggles. He likes the sound of that. He's still laughing as he pushes into the shop, his eyes watering now from the force of it.

The haze that is Scarecrow (probably) turns back to him. "Oh," he says, "this is interesting. What are you seeing, I wonder?"

Green. Green is what he's seeing, green like the chemical depths of the sea where nothing can live but radioactive microorganisms. His jaw clicks under the strain of his laughter. He reaches out, knuckles knocking against the glass of the case, hand twitching and fumbling until it finds the handle of a knife and drags it up from its block. The tip squeals across the glass.

Scarecrow draws back. "Aggressive reactions known to occur in unprimed patients," he mutters, as if he's recording notes for himself. "However, current subject does not appear to be targeting a hallucination."

Jack struggles for air, the desperation of his lungs choking out everything but the odd giggle, and pushes forward regardless. He is seeing Scarecrow through a film, but seeing him nonetheless.

"You," Jack gasps, "you look a little, heh, nervous there."

"Current subject appears cognizant of my presence," Scarecrow hisses. "Retreat is advised."

In the unlit glass of the case, as Jack passes, he sees himself reflected—his lips smeared with blood and venom, he seems to wink—and understands dimly that there is something terrible inside him, something that even Scarecrow is afraid of.

"Come examine me," he croons, dragging himself closer. "Tell me what I am, hmmmm?"

Scarecrow jerks backwards, finds himself cornered, and crouches down as if he's getting ready to lash out. Jack smiles at him.

"You _should_ be scared of me," Jack says, and throws his whole weight behind the point of the knife, burying it in the plaster of the wall as Scarecrow rolls and scrambles out from underneath him. He leaves it buried there. Scarecrow is skittering backwards towards the door, low to the tile, but Jack is following. " _I'm_ scared of me," he tells the man, gleeful and eager, a child sharing a secret.

All this time and the terrible thing dogging his footsteps, the nightmares, the shadows, the darkness seeped into the walls of his bedroom—this is funny! The whole time, it was only him! His fingers slide down the side of his coat and into his pocket, where the heavy weight of—yes, he always carries it with him, he tries to leave it behind in the mornings and finds it there anyways, like another awful dream—his pistol.

This is fear that transcends fear, an oroboros that consumes itself, this is anything and this is everything, all possibilities. He can feel the chambers click under the press of his thumb. Forget the knife. Forget all of it. He wonders why he waited this long?

Under the click of metal, he hears something like a hiccup. Or a sob. He freezes, twisting his head to look over his shoulder. There's a tennis shoe peeking out from behind the doorway to the back hall. There's the girl, one eye visible, watching him.

She is the clearest thing in this room, _impossibly_ clear, perfectly rendered in his shaky vision as she seems to fill everything, her one eye wet and dark and reflecting a Jack that winks again, steps down onto the pitted tile, spins the chamber of the revolver like a showman announcing the odds of the roulette; the terrible thing that knows him and waits for him and is coming now, even now, the man who this girl is seeing—

The moment shatters like so much glass under his hands, gouging and dangerous as it goes to pieces, unrecoverable.

There's a mad scuffle of motion that tells him Scarecrow is gone, but his eyes are too fixed on the floor to check. His knees are aching though he doesn't remember hitting the ground. He digs his nails into the skin around his mouth, presses his palm harder into the tile, finds himself making desperate little keening sounds as he tries to force a shout from his throat like a terrified sleeper. His whole body shakes with the effort.

Jack comes down in a nightmarish haze, he doesn't know how much later. The sky is empty and clear again, when he finally can look up, but growing a little amber with late afternoon sunshine. The city is remarkably quiet. He carefully runs his hand over the dried tackiness of the monstrous mixture on his chin and cheek, and his glove comes away dark with powdery flakes of blood.

He lifts up off his hands, every muscles aching in a new way, and looks back to the doorway where the kids had huddled. They're still there. One of them looks like he's asleep, or at least catatonic. Everybody is in one piece.

Jack takes a deep breath, so deep that he feels for a second like he's going to vomit from the pressure of it, and coughs it back out again. Okay. Okay. So, all collateral aside, mission accomplished. He lifts himself up on shaky legs and makes his way back towards them, stalling out uncertainly when the girl flinches away from him. Okay. He's not going to try getting any closer. That's—that's fine.

He asks her for a number he can call. A parent, or a sibling, or something. It takes her a couple of tries to remember. He gets the shop phone and slides it across the floor to her when she flinches again, drawing back from his attempt to simply hand it to her. Her fingers are small and they have trouble punching the ancient square buttons.

Jack simply stands in the doorway while she sobs incoherently into the receiver. If she can't get the information out in another minute, he'll take over. Just a minute. He just needs a minute. His fingers sink into his pockets and then snap back out, as if burned. The pistol is still there, real and cold and heavy.

He keeps thinking about taking up smoking. Any excuse to hide his mouth behind his hand, to focus his energy on something small and manageable, like the movement of smoke in and out of his lungs. But he knows that if he picks it up he'll never be able to stop. He's too nervous by nature. So he only stands there and thinks about it.

In the end, the girl is still sobbing so Jack takes the phone away from her and gives directions to her frantic parent, and then they all wait in exhausted silence until the woman arrives. She hardly even looks at Jack as she flies by, which probably explains why her thank-yous sound so desperately, sincerely grateful.

Jack watches her smoothing her fingers over her daughter's wild hair. He thinks about the home they'll go back to. He thinks about his reflection in the case. He thinks that he's always suspected there was a reason why he belonged nowhere. What can he do? He's always known there was something terrible behind him, something waiting to be uncovered with just the wrong backwards step. He still doesn't know what it is, but he certainly knows what it _feels_ like now. He's nauseatingly certain that the next time he tries to look another human in the eye, he's going to remember that awful ocean of power and powerlessness, the fear and laughter, and he's going to be sick.

"Uh, hey," he manages, hiding as much of his face behind his hand as he can, "can I—can I have the phone back?"

The mother pushes his phone into his hand, apologizing much more than needed. Jack swallows, stares down at it. It takes him a couple tries before he can take his hand off his face to hit the buttons.

There's the usual ringing. For a moment he thinks it's going to go to voicemail, but then, there he is—

" _Jack_?" Bruce says, urgent, no hesitation. Jack sinks into it gratefully.

"Huh-hi, Bruce," Jack says. "Sorry to—heh—bother you twice in one day, but—"

"Where are you?" Bruce says, immediately. "I'm coming to get you."

Jack smears tears away from his cheeks with the heel of his palm before they can leave pathetic tracks in the mask of gore. For the millionth time, he wonders if Bruce can actually be real. "Still at the shop," he says, "you know me, always working overtime."

"Right, of course," says Bruce, who probably has caller ID. "Hold still. I'm ten minutes away."

Ten minutes seem like an awfully long time. Jack laughs wetly into the receiver. "Could you stay on the line?"

"Sure," Bruce says. Jack thinks he can maybe hear the sound of an engine starting up. "Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

Jack turns, looks at his reflection in the dark glass of the display case. It looks back at him with watery, nervous eyes. Whatever Scarecrow stirred up in him, there's no trace of it left now. It's never left him though, not before and certainly not now. That much is clear.

"Oh, I'm okay," he says. "I just—got held up, that's all."


	3. it's just a chemical

**i.**

In his dream tonight, Jack watches the strange star expanding over the roofs of Gotham, black and bright like the heart of an angel. A heavenly darkness. It's quiet, in his dream, and the sky seems to sigh above him. It's pure in a way that he aches for, a destructive force that will burn the world to clean dry ashes. He watches it from the roof of the library, his heels swinging over the ruined streets below. When he wakes he will remember that this is his view from the night of Bloom's terror, the first night that he spoke to Bruce, the first great Gotham Catastrophe since his awakening in the foam of sludge dragged up from that stygian cave.

It different from his usual dreams, which are murky and chaotic and bring him to the brink of a nausea so intense that it can push him gasping up from the depths of sleep. This dream is clean. This dream is quiet. He looks down on the city and it is as peaceful as it is ruined.

He wakes up blinking. He lifts a hand towards the phantom of the black star, fingers cold and bloodless in the darkness. The neon outside his window flashes, lighting up the heavy edges of his curtains. Is this a good omen or a bad omen? Should he be worried that the most peaceful dreams he can remember are the memories of the worst cataclysm he's lived through?

He rolls over. Practicality wins out; he'll take whatever sleep he can get.

 **ii.**

"Who was it," Jack asks the next day, as he bags a roast for Mrs. Calligan, "who took down Bloom? I mean, at the end of it?"

If Mrs. Calligan has noticed that he's marginally perkier than usual today, she hasn't commented on it. She looks up from her phone and gives him an uncertain once-over. "Well Commissioner Gordon did, of course. There was an award ceremony and everything, don't you have cable?"

Jack has this lingering dissatisfaction even after getting his answer, so he asks the next customer too. Mr. Ballinger tells him it was Superman, but Mr. Ballinger also tells him it was a big cover up and not to trust the media and Jack decides that doesn't sound quite right either. So, he asks Bruce.

They're in the park at the foot of Wayne Enterprises HQ, which will belong to Bruce once more just as soon as he finishes the paperwork he's currently filling out. Jack is learning that his boyfriend is kind of a workaholic—there's only one sort of person who will go from filling out paperwork in an office to filling out paperwork in the park below the office and call it a lunch break.

"It was one of the robins, as I understand it," Bruce says. His lips twitch, unhappily, reflecting for a moment some memory beyond Jack's reach. "And the Commissioner, of course, but I have a feeling you wouldn't be asking if that was all you meant."

"Which Robin?"

"Would you know the difference?" Bruce asks, smiling briefly. It's a relief to see that disconcerting little frown wiped away again.

"No," Jack admits. Still, this answer feels right in a way that the other answers didn't, and so he lays it to rest. It's become a Robin's city in the last month or two anyways. There's a flash of red on every corner.

"Looks like I've got a CEO for a boyfriend after all," Jack remarks instead, watching Bruce's pen scratch across the signature line for yet another incomprehensible form. It looks tax related. "And after I'd just managed to resign myself to a future in exiled royalty."

"A working prince is a bit less romantic than an exiled prince," Bruce says, without looking up. "Are you disappointed?"

Jack tilts his head and looks Bruce over. When he's working he seems fuller—not exactly happier, because he's usually a happy guy, but more… himself. Like there's more of himself to fill the body that he wears, the body that seems to have so many pockets sewn shut for good. Motion suits him.

"Like I said," Jack answers, "I can think of a couple good uses for a CEO."

Bruce smiles.

In truth, Jack is uneasy. Bruce has his secrets, and Wayne Enterprises sure seems like it's at the dark heart of those secrets. Whoever Bruce was before the accident, that distant unhappy specter, his life revolved around something behind those gilded doors. It makes Jack nervous to see another Bruce disappearing behind them once again.

Another frown, this one more pronounced, draws Jack out of his musing. He nudges Bruce and gives him a curious look.

Bruce tips the sheet of paper towards him so he can scan the contents. It's a deed of inheritance, in case of Bruce's death.

"Richard Grayson?" Jack reads.

"He's a young man who lives in Bludhaven," Bruce says, rolling his shoulders as if he can't quite get comfortable against the park bench. "I took him in after his parents were killed. Apparently. He's the one in the photo at the manor. I asked Alfred about it—actually I lost my temper a little bit, which wasn't fair of me. He said that Dick—the kid goes by Dick—was presumed dead at the time of our accident. I guess he didn't know how to tell me to mourn a child I don't even remember."

It seems to Jack that every month he knows Bruce, the circle of people who were waiting for him to return grows exponentially. A sort of father, a sort of girlfriend, a sort of son—Bruce has a whole life behind him. A whole family around him, even now. Jack tries not to be petty about it, but his fists clench in his pockets even still. There was no one waiting for _him_.

"All that time I was working with Jules's kids," Bruce murmurs, lost to his own gnawing thoughts, "and I had kids of my own out there."

Jack has been with him to the center, once or twice, because for the first month they knew each other it had seemed to be such a big part of his life. Lately, with the backlogs of unspoken conversations with Julia Powers—which Jack couldn't begin to unweave—and the newly reappointed executive office, and the strange distraction that comes more and more over Bruce as he goes about the city, Jack hasn't been back in a while. He watches the lines in Bruce's forehead deepen, and thinks of the children that Bruce absolutely dotes on. It's probably hard to go back there, knowing that he has a son of his own now, wondering how much of this he's already done for a boy he can't remember.

"That's… not the end of it, either," Bruce admits. He looks over at Jack, chewing his lip like he's trying to decide whether it's safe to share a secret. For a man who claims to have so little to hide, Bruce has an inordinate amount of secrets. "There was another one—he's still on some of the paperwork."

Bruce shuffles out what looks like the photocopy of a very old document. Listed under Richard Grayson there is a Jason Todd.

"Jason is dead," Bruce says, turning the paper back around. He runs a thumb over the faded signature , without seeming to notice himself doing it. "I checked. Accident abroad. I wouldn't even know what he looked like, if it weren't for the yearbook photo on his school's website. And there's a Tim Drake involved, somehow, as far as I can tell he's alive but unreachable, and I worry—I'm sorry," Bruce says, shoving the photocopy deep into the stack of forms. "I don't want to unload on you. You have enough on your plate."

Jack watches him, taking him apart piece by piece. The hunched set of the shoulders say that he's afraid he's shared too much. The way his fingers move over the papers say that he wants to do something about it all, only there's nothing he can do.

"Lotta dead kids," Jack says, at last.

Bruce nods grimly. "I had—" he says, "a son. A biological one. If he's not here then—I don't know who his mother was but I hope—"

Jack whistles. "Lotta dead kids."

"Statistically…" Bruce starts, and then he shakes his head. "If I hadn't been in their lives, I'm sure they'd all still be alive and whole. I'm responsible for hurting these boys that I haven't even met."

Jack tsks. "B-man, I'm not saying it isn't unlucky, but you're not any kind of serial childkiller. I think we'd know about that by now."

The late summer air goes dead and cold around Bruce, a wind from the north sweeps unseasonably over them. How long has Bruce been turning this over in his head? Surely he's not _that_ good at shutting Jack out, it can't have been more than a week, can it?

"I'm the common denominator," Bruce says. "I took them up into my life and—"

"Bruuuuuce," Jack says, flopping over the back of the bench. "Come on. What, you think they smothered themselves in those huge fluffy beds you have? Maybe they overdosed on caviar? Golly, maybe they gave themselves heart attacks over how safe your security system is."

"No," Bruce says, for once not rising to the bait. Usually that kind of absurdity would get at least a flicker of a smile. Today Bruce seems to be made of stone, and it's that more than anything that sobers Jack.

"Do you think you hurt them?" Jack asks, all the sarcasm draining out of his voice.

"I—" Bruce says. He digs the heel of a palm into his eye. "No, that's not it. I don't think I did anything _to_ them, I just—I put them in danger, I _let_ things happen to them. I didn't protect them. What kind of father…"

Jack's elbows are over the back of the bench, his left hand is just a finger's width from Bruce's shoulder. He almost reaches out. But he's afraid to startle the man.

"I don't remember my parents," Jack says. "You remember yours, a little. I guess you'd know better than me, but as far as I'm concerned—if I had to pick a father, I'd want a man like you."

Bruce manages to raise an eyebrow at him, a ghost of a smile somewhere in there. Jack rolls his eyes. "Yes, it's very Freudian, please let me give you a somewhat creepy compliment in peace as is my custom."

The ghost smile dissolves. Bruce returns his faraway gaze to the far edge of the park, where the headless statue of Thomas Wayne is cheerfully collecting migratory birds. "I wouldn't want a man like me. Not a man like whoever I was."

"Hey," Jack says, "self pity isn't cute."

He turns, catching Bruce's cheek in one hand. He leans in close, searching the familiar lines of that body, the striking blue of those eyes. From nowhere in particular, his broken memory decides to remind him that all irises are blue underneath the layers of dark muscle above. Blue eyes are honest eyes.

"Brucie, honey, you're not a cruel man. No amount of missing memory is going to change that. You're fundamentally a good man. Whatever mistakes that guy made, big as they might have been, I don't think any version of you would have done what you didn't honestly believe was the right and kind thing for another person."

Bruce looks away. Through the glove, Jack can't feel whether his skin is hot or cold.

"People look up to you," Jack says. "Those kids you volunteer with. Gotham. Me. You know right from wrong. A lot of us aren't that lucky."

Bruce doesn't look convinced, but he does lean into Jack's hand.

"Didn't you say the first one is still alive? See if he'll talk to you."

"Maybe I'd rather not know," Bruce says. He grimaces, his pretty features forced into a frown that looks both wrong and right on his face—wrong for the brightness of his eyes, for the kind of man he is. Right in a strange inevitable way, as if his face is anticipating wrinkles that haven't yet burst to the surface.

Jack brushes a loose strand of hair back off Bruce's forehead and then lets go. "If you don't wanna know then you don't have to know. Decide which one it is and then own that. You and me, if there's one good thing that came out of all this—" he gestures to both of them, the sky, the late summer afternoon, "—we get to decide who we are. Most people never get that chance. Most people wouldn't know what to do with that choice if they did get it."

"Doesn't it ever worry you?" Bruce says. "That the life you left behind—the _you_ that you left behind—might have been terrible?"

Jack tugs the hem of his glove down, tighter over his fingers. For a moment he can feel the cold walls of his apartment cinching down around him, with their nightmare shadows. "Sure," he says. "Sometimes, I guess."

 **iii.**

The way that Jack eventually meets Robin is the same way that he meets everyone these days, that is, because of Bruce. In celebration of Bruce finally getting the company back under his own name, six hundred of his closest friends (and Jack) are all invited to wander the newly renovated top floor of the headquarters, glittering in evening-wear. Jack sticks close to Bruce wherever possible. Every time he tries to have a conversation of his own, he says something that makes the other guests grimace into their wine. One nice young woman went positively white when he made an offhand joke about the _who's who of who's getting robbed tonight_. You'd think in a city like Gotham folks would be used to it. Maybe he's missing some kind of social subtext here.

Parties aren't getting any easier. He'd walk over a landmine barefoot if it was where Bruce wanted to go, but the magazine-glossy smiles and the glittering chandeliers and Bruce's canned laughter still run a nail up the easily-spooked knots of his spine. Bruce bought him a new outfit for these events, but he still feels glaringly out of place here, as if everyone can see the penniless outsider wearing through at the elbows of his sharp white suit.

It's the first Wayne Enterprises Gala since the Batman disappeared months ago. Bruce confided in him earlier, as he was tugging the knot of his tie closed, that he expected there to be some trouble before the night was out. Historically, there always was. Jack is finding it easy to pick the veterans out from the new blood—the veterans look very nice, but their glitter has the slightly plastic look of costume jewelry.

He suspects that Bruce is actively testing his luck, trying to get a feel for the city as it is now by throwing himself and his company right into the chum-littered depths. Jack can't imagine being anywhere else, while the man he loves is deliberately placing himself in such danger, but he also can't stop looking up into the green glare of the parlor lights and remembering the last time he was in real physical danger. The scrape of metal along glass, the bleach and blood taste of fear toxin—when Bruce taps him on the arm to get his attention, the glass he's holding tumbles and smashes on the carpet.

Alfred gives him a _terrible_ glare.

Bruce catches his cheek in one broad hand, just briefly, as he checks for signs of an oncoming panic attack. Jack just shakes his head and gives him a weak smile. They're getting good at reading each other now, but in all modesty, Jack was always pretty good at it.

"Relax," Bruce says, softly, "everything is going to be fine."

"I wish I had your confidence," Jack mutters, but he waits until Bruce has already squeezed his arm and walked off to say it. Alone again in the glittering mass, Jack decides that he needs to retreat before he can start to feel anxious about letting one of the staff members clean up his ruined wineglass. He whips a rag off the belt of a passing waiter and presses it into the carpet, cranberry stains seeping up into the crisp white fabric. They look like mouths opening up, dark red mouths, sucking cancerous mouths—

Another pair of white gloves gingerly but firmly peels his hands away from the stains (just stains again, all at once, only harmless stains), and Jack startles up to find himself face to face with Alfred. As usual, around Jack, his mouth is twisted into the faintest moue of distaste.

"Please, Master Doe," he says, and in his mouth the name always sounds a little like an accusation, "you'll stain your gloves."

Jack snatches back his hands, where lo and behold pinpricks of red are spreading across the seams. Jack blushes with embarrassment and shoves them deep in his pockets as he stands. "Uh," he says, "thanks."

"Don't mention it," says Alfred. He glances up at Jack for barely the fraction of a second, his gaze like a stone drill, relentless and cool. What is he looking at when he looks at Jack—into Jack, deep into places that even he can't seem to pry open? Jack scans the room, and then he leans down, close enough to unspool a secret.

"Did I—" he swallows, "Look. Did I know you, back before?"

Alfred's back stiffens, but his fingers continue to delicately free shards of glass from the carpet. "Why in the world would you think that?"

Jack rocks back on his heels, looks at anything but Alfred. "I know, I know, what would I have been doing in a place like this, with people like these? But every time you look at me I feel like, heh, you're peeling my skin off? Like maybe you're looking for something in particular."

Alfred stands, and stands to attention. Folded in his gloved hands like the downy corpse of a bird is the stained white napkin, full of shattered crunchy glass. "This would have been a better conversation to have two months ago," he says.

"So you did know me," Jack says. His tongue is dry in his mouth. The question that leaps to his cracking lips, as he steps closer, is, "When you knew me, before, were Bruce and me—were we—"

There's the faintest crunching sound from between Alfred's hands. "You," he says, "were obsessed. You were—dangerous. Deluded."

The lethal cocktail of anxiety and self loathing strikes him right between the ribs before he can even take a breath, with enough force to turn his stomach, to bring water to the corners of his eyes. He remembers the night under the overpass, the recognition like a meteor strike, the frightening outpour of love for a total stranger, so much sudden and endless love. He remembers Alfred's shock and horror the night they were introduced. All the ugly jagged pieces click together into a hideous whole.

"You were toxic," Alfred is saying, with the same stone-faced stillness, but the undercurrent of his voice is growing more savage, more urgent, as he says, "You were a poison. You tore people apart to feed your own selfish obsessions; people that I loved, people that _Bruce_ loved, and although I'm willing to pretend for his sake that a leopard might in fact change its spots, Master Doe, do not for one _moment_ believe that I am ever more than a breath away if you take so much as one step out of line."

Jack is clutching his forehead, fingers threaded through his hair, looking at nothing now, at the floor maybe, at the blotches of cancerous red in the dead white thing Alfred is holding (Jack killed that too, with his clumsy broken hands—)

The glass clinks and crunches against itself, and then there is the weight of Alfred's hand on Jack's shoulder. It's not quite comforting, not quite; it's distant, like the hand of a mostly absent father, but it is solid.

"Come now," Alfred says, the savage bitterness gone as quickly as it came, leaving not much behind. "Breathe. I don't have any intention of talking about the past with Bruce." With a sigh, he guides Jack back upright, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe bubbles of panicked tears from Jack's cheeks. "There's a good man. Come on now. You may prove me wrong yet," he murmurs.

Jack absolutely despairs of everything; if he tried, he couldn't bring himself to so much as open his mouth. When Alfred is gone, he drags himself to a balcony and hangs over the edge, taking deep gulps of city air. He stays out there for a long time, the same loathsome wordless loop playing again and again. He should have known it was too good to be true—a thing like him, an apple rotting from its core out? Loved? He feels like a kidnapper who has woken to find his victim tightening their own ropes, like a thief who has gotten away with too much. The nausea doubles.

Below him the lights of Gotham glitter green and gold. The sirens wail far away. This changes everything. Jack's not deluded enough to imagine it doesn't. He watches the headlights below march along their staggered way, slumping further and still further, his toes barely scraping the stone now.

There's a light thump on the ledge beside him. He pulls back far enough to see a hooded figure perched there, head tilted just so. It's a boy.

"You had better not jump," the boy says. "I won't catch you," he adds, eyes narrowing behind his domino mask.

"I wasn't," Jack says, a buzz of guilt down the back of his spine. Was he? He's not sure. "Are you a robin?" Jack asks him, sliding down until his heels are once again flat to the ground.

The boy snorts. "I _am_ Robin," he says. "There's only one _real_ Robin."

Jack gets the distinct impression that this is not an argument he had better get involved in if he likes all his knuckles to remain where they are in his body. "Well," he says, "what brings Robin up here on a night like tonight?"

Robin folds his arms over his crouched knees, gaze sliding to the world of warmth and light beyond the double doors. "Wayne," he says. "Throwing this party is like hanging a slab of meat over an alligator tank."

"I was thinking that too," Jack says quietly. For a moment they watch the hectic glow of the party from their dark perch in silence, sharing a single wordless dread, until Jack physically shakes it off. "But Bruce says we'll be perfectly safe, as long as we go with the flow."

"You're his boyfriend," Robin says, as if he's just remembering something important. "Why in the world would he let you into a party that's bound to be sieged?"

It doesn't surprise Jack much that the Robins know about his relationship with Gotham's most valuable billionaire. It's something of an open secret anyways. "Let me?" Jack echoes. He cracks a smile, although it still feels a little sick with acid. "He couldn't keep me out if he tried."

From the pockets of his coat Jack draws his pistol, spinning it between his thumb and forefinger like a gunslinger from a western, and he turns his grin on Robin who, to his credit, does a pretty good job of pretending the throwing star suddenly in his fist has nothing to do with any of this.

The grin fades. What right does he have to be happy now, knowing what he knows about them both, knowing what Bruce doesn't yet know?

Robin is eyeing him. "Don't you think about it," he says. "You take one step towards that ledge and I'll break your knees."

"I _wasn't_ ," Jack sighs, but he puts his hands up anyway.

"What've you got to be sorry about, anyways?" Robin sniffs. "Most of the girls in Gotham would kill to be you right now. Even _with_ the inevitable robbery tonight."

"I don't think you're old enough to understand."

Robin bristles. "Is it a sex thing?" he says. "Because I know about _sex_ thank you very much. And it's certainly not worth throwing yourself off a building for."

Jack slumps until his shoulders are level with his ears. "That I could deal with."

Robin rolls his eyes. "So whatever it is," he says, "go _talk_ to him about it. You've only got a couple minutes before something goes spectacularly wrong, so you better talk fast."

The small hand that smacks Jack across the shoulders has enough force behind it to propel him across the balcony and through the doors, into the chatter and shine of the party, which carries on all around him like a wind up tableau. He ducks between the guest's glittering paths. They are strange, ghostly—or maybe he's the ghost, a whisper of cold wind blowing through a hall. He gets as far as the steps where Bruce is standing, laughing with a stranger; he gets just far enough to see Bruce look up and begin to smile, and then the doors are blown in.

Guests scatter, falling across the floor and ducking into alcoves, clutching their heads like children from a nuclear safety PSA. Jack falls to a knee, covering his eyes in the crux of his elbow as shards of wood batter the floor around him. In the lavender smoke that pours through the newly opened door, Black Mask adjusts his cufflinks. A flood of his goons spill into the room, armed to the teeth and visored above that, a wall of perfectly anonymous armor plated meat. Black Mask flicks splinters from his shoulders.

"Hello Ladies and Gentlemen," he says, strolling up the wide steps and onto the floor. "It's good to see you all again after so long. I seem to have lost my invitation on the way here, but I think you'll find me an unobtrusive guest all the same."

Around the edges of the room, a fair number of figures sigh and unclasp their earrings, dutifully unstrapping their Rolexes and slumping against the wall to wait. Jack doesn't get up. The energy that propelled him across the floor thus far, borrowed from the boy on the sill, sputters and evaporates, and Jack falls back across the carpet about as energetic as a corpse.

The window bangs open as Robin dives through it. Jack watches the vague shadow play of action on the ceiling, half tuned into the sounds of evacuation and a panic for once not his own. A throwing knife embeds itself in the floor beside his head. There's gunfire, Robin crowing as he swoops down from the chandelier, Black Mask howling orders at his men—Jack only half notices any of it. It's only when he feels a heaviness against his side that he finally turns his head enough to notice Bruce, trench-crawling on his elbows to Jack's side.

"Hello again," Jack says. "You should take cover."

"I could tell you the same thing," Bruce hisses. "What the hell are you doing out here?"

Jack absently reaches up and pulls free the throwing knife beside his ear. "B-man, have you considered that maybe you wouldn't like me if you hadn't lost your memories?"

Bruce groans, even as he carefully places his own back between Jack and the smoking, popping chaos of the room. Jack has this inane urge to boop their noses together.

"If you want to talk about this," Bruce says, "let's at least do it somewhere out of the line of fire?"

 _Whumph._ The chandelier crackles. The floors shake. Bruce buries his face in Jack's neck, his hand quickly wrapping around the back of Jack's skull. Black Mask shouts, rapid fire now and urgent, not dramatic. It's hard to tell where Robin is. Jack can't see anything over Bruce's shoulder, but he can hear the click-thump of machinery, and then the deafening roar of suppressing fire.

His ears are still ringing when Bruce is jerked off of him. He watches it like a silent movie, barely comprehending the change. It takes three henchmen to pry Bruce free. Jack watches him straining in their grip, his mouth drawing back into a snarl. His perfect white teeth. His broad shoulders, pushing the limits of his beautiful dinner jacket.

What an odd view…

They pull Jack to his feet too, after a ringing mute moment, iron grips and professional disinterest. He can kind of make out what Bruce is saying, snapping terse as he struggles against the men pinning his shoulders back. He's saying they had better leave Jack out of this. It occurs to Jack that he's especially beautiful when he's roiling with anger—he burns like the sun, his charisma goes thermonuclear. Jack smiles dreamily, resting his cheek on the shoulder of a nearby henchman.

Someone must answer Bruce, because he throws himself forward, talking loud enough now that Jack can hear every word out of his mouth. It's so sweet that he's worrying. It honestly makes Jack feel like someone has stuffed his chest with powdered sugar.

"Hey," Jack says, with a reassuring smile. His voice is faint in his own ears. "I'm _fine_. Take it easy, big guy."

At last, as Bruce is cooling off infinitesimally, Jack gets his first look at the villain. She's kitted up in a flak jacket and a long coat, spirals of white teeth painted around the visor of her round helmet. As she comes to a halt in front of him, she reaches out and jabs his soft middle with one of her long black nails. He giggles nervously.

She's too muffled by her helmet to make out, but whatever she says, it takes the fight right out of Bruce. The henchmen drop Jack. He stumbles a step, collects himself, and pauses to wiggle a pinky in his ear. "Did you do something heroic?" he asks Bruce, a little amused despite himself.

"You'll be fine now," Bruce says. "I'm cooperating."

Jack considers this. He shoves his hands in his pockets. As much as he's enjoying this outpouring of affection, he can't stop himself from thinking of the conversation that awaits them both, after all this is done. He can't bear the thought of Bruce putting himself in danger for Jack's sake without even _knowing_ —with the very real possibility that he'll come to regret this by the end of the night. Jack doesn't deserve any of this. He feels like a parasite, like a cuckoo bird in the nest of a sweet foolish robin.

The woman in the visor with the gaping paint maw has already lost interest in him—she's snapping at her employees, directing the clean-up as they drag Black Mask off into a coat closet, presumably still alive. Jack winks at Bruce. Bruce has just enough time to widen his eyes in the space between Jack drawing his gun and spinning the chamber, just long enough to begin to shout before the firing pin drops.

It was a good try, but unfortunately, Jack forgot to account for the flak jacket.

 **i** **v.**

In a cavern underneath the edge of town, chair tied to the back of Bruce's chair, Jack lets out a chagrinned little sigh.

"Sorry about that," he says to the darkness, "I guess I'm not used to heroics."

There's a surprised little laugh, a breath in the emptiness. "We sure fumbled that one," Bruce agrees, sounding tired but no worse for the wear. "Next time, let me follow through on my big sacrifice."

"But you're already so good at it," Jack says. "Come on coach, put me in the game."

He can hear Bruce smiling as he says, "Do you think next time we should flip a coin to see who gets to be the hero?"

In the silence that follows Bruce's soft laughter, Jack's grin begins to fade. "Look, darling," he says, "we gotta talk about something."

There's a creak as Bruce slumps or settles into his own seat. "You sure you don't want to wait until Scylla is in jail to do this? Or at least until someone unties us?"

"Honestly, Bruce? I'm having trouble thinking about anything else. I'm not gonna be good company."

"Alright. Go ahead then."

Jack contemplates the darkness for a moment, turning the words over in his head. The faint green glow of the tech in the next cavern over is giving him an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.

"It's just," he says. "Alfred said we knew each other before the accident."

The cavern is quiet. "Did he?" Bruce murmurs.

"I have to wonder—" Jack swallows, "—what are the chances of a guy like me and a guy like you having anything to do with each other?"

He can feel Bruce shrugging. "Statistically, lightning is much more likely to strike the same target twice. We like each other now, and I'm sure we haven't changed _that_ much."

Jack huffs. "That's not what I'm talking about."

"Then what are you talking about?"

"Alfred didn't make it sound pretty. And I'm just some—some nobody, some vagrant, not even a real butcher. And you're a celebrity? You gotta hear how that sounds."

"You think you were my _stalker_ , Jack?"

"What if all—this—" Jack wiggles his fingers in his bindings, "isn't head trauma? What if I've always been a headcase? Jeeze, what if I used to be _worse?"_

"Jack, I think this is the paranoia talking here. If you _were_ stalking me, there would be records. Police files. Restraining orders. We'd at least have turned up your identity by now."

"Unless you didn't know it," Jack says, grimly.

Water is dripping somewhere in the anterior chamber. Was the cavern that the rescue teams dragged them up from like this one? Jack tries to imagine the conversation they might have had in that dire darkness, the two of them, after the earth fell in. What the people they had been would have talked about. He's never before considered that they might have been in that park for the same reason, that they might have been found in the same place together by more than cosmic coincidence.

"Alright," Bruce says, at last. "We're going to lean into the curve here. Let's assume you're right. What do we do about it?"

"It doesn't _bother_ you?"

"Jack. I love you."

Jack shivers.

"I know you worry that you're not a good person, or that your mental illness is going to get someone hurt. Okay, I know about all that. And let's say maybe you're not, and maybe it will. But maybe I've hurt people too, and maybe I'm not a good person either."

"That's not the same," Jack mutters.

"I love you," Bruce pushes on, "and if you loved me before then I'm certain that I loved you too. I know you, Jack, and when you love something you throw your whole self into it. It's the best part of you. No matter who we were, or what we meant ourselves to be, I know I couldn't watch you loving me without loving you in return."

In the distance, warped by echo and reverb, there's a pop as if something electronic has been doused in water, and then distant cacophony.

"That'll be the robins," Bruce notes. "They made better time than I hoped, sooooo either they're extremely interested in Scylla or extremely interested in me, which is a little bit intimidating."

Jack is still trying to rub tear tracks off on his shoulder, with little luck.

A shadow appears at the barred iron gate. It whistles. "Wow," it says, "I know it's hard to beat the classics but this security system is practically _medieval_."

"Is that good?" Bruce calls out.

The robin at the gate shakes their head, more amused than worried. "Kind of hard to hack an iron gate, except in the literal sense. Hang on a tick, I need to find a chainsaw."

"Take your time." There's a shift of cloth, and then the back of his head meets Jack's, with a tired but companionable pressure. "I'm just going to rest here a little while," Bruce says, "with my friend."

 **v.**

They're leaving the cavern, trailing a ways behind the leaping figures of a couple dauntless robins, when the earth starts to shake. Pebbles skitter free from the ceiling. Without thinking, Jack grabs for Bruce's hand.

"That's not good," one robin says to the other, eyeing the stalactites that loom all down the length of the corridor. The second robin holds his wrist to his mouth and says, "Duke to Damian, what's going on with Scylla?"

The tiny small voice comes through after a moment, "Code names! And she's not doing anything. I've got her right here."

The robin—Duke, presumably—looks back at Bruce. He looks urgent, expectant, and then all of a sudden it's as if a shutter falls over his expression. "10-4," he says into the communicator. "Keep her secure. I'm heading up to assess the situation."

Over the static grumbling that comes through in response, the first robin aims her flashlight at the ceiling and says, "You remember what I was saying about Scylla and Charybdis being a matched pair?"

"I remember," Duke says grimly.

The next shudder through the earth brings down a buckshot scattering of stalactites, plowing up clouds of cold shrapnel. Bruce drags Jack back into the curve of a wall just in time to avoid the collapse. His arm is up over Jack, his hand clutching the back of Jack's head again—automatically, precisely the same motion as before, like something drilled. From below them, back the way they've come, there is an alarming amount of slithering and rattling going on.

"I don't think I want to know what that is," Bruce says, breathing hard.

"I'll pass too," Jack says.

Bruce takes his hand and pulls him over the wreckage of the collapsing cavern, effortlessly lifting him up onto the rubble when the wreckage grows too thick to bypass. At his side, as Bruce scans the floor for a solid place to put their feet next, Jack scans the darkness behind them like a sailor in an old cartoon, a hand to his forehead. He whistles at something in the far darkness, moving up laboriously into the light. "Thar she blows," he remarks.

At the first sight of a huge knotted hand scrabbling up through the rubble, Jack turns on his heel, loops his elbow under Bruce's, and takes a running leap at the next lump of shadow. They land in a stumble, sliding over loose stone shrapnel—Bruce catches him by the lapel just before his heel can slip off the side and reels him back in.

"We can't keep doing that," Bruce says, worry creasing his forehead. "One of us is going to slip."

Jack takes another look at the thing pulling itself up from the deeps behind them. "You catch me," he says, "I'll catch you."

"I don't think—"

"Come on!" He slaps a palm to the ruined breast of Bruce's dinner jacket, flashing a roguish grin. "I'll bet that body of yours remembers a thing or two about base jumping!"

Bruce looks like he's about to protest, but at the wretched howl of the thing behind them, he gives up. They take a running jump. Yard by yard, they scramble to gain ground, shedding shoes and jackets as they go. Bruce gets a loafer stuck in a crack and abandons it with barely a pause to swear at the loss. The weird part is that even coated in dust and sweating through his dress shirt, this is probably the best Jack has felt in months. He lands first on the one ahead and takes Bruce's hand in mid-fall, swinging him down into the embrace of a waltz, laughing as they go around again, laughing as he disengages for the next leap.

Charybdis claws at the walls below with her huge claws, glittering bands around fingers as blue and heavy as the stone itself.

The light of the foremost cavern is growing as they close the distance. Ahead they can hear robins shouting, the sound of gunfire. It won't be much safer up there, but at least they'll be able to see the floor. Bruce isn't laughing but he _is_ bright again, as he allows himself to be pulled into the steps of Jack's increasingly reckless tread, into the flourishes and the staged gaffes. They dance out from underneath falling wreckage as smoothly as the figures of a clockwork music box, and straight into the arms of robins reaching down to them, hands outstretched.

They emerge into green light and gunfire, sliding along the curve of the wall, behind the sparking remains of some old fashioned super computer.

"The other one's down there," Bruce whispers to the robins. "It's big."

"How big," the robin ahead of them asks.

"Have you seen killer croc?"

"Briefly, sure."

"Bigger."

Bruce is eyeing the cave through each gap in the circuitry. He seems far away, far away in the same way the sun is—thermonuclear and awesome, just close enough for you to feel the force of it. He points at the billowy stone deposits along the rim of the high ceilings. "If those come down they'll block the entrance. Get two robins up there to knock it loose, and have someone cut the line to the electronics. They've got to be using a generator, this tech is too old to be wireless. They're using semi automatic weapons which means they have to aim. How many of you have night vision?"

"Damien," the robin says, immediately.

"Damien leads the charge. Get him on coms and have him orient the team. At close quarters it should be difficult but possible to subdue blind targets. Best if you can turn the lights back on afterward. Warn Damien and have them pull the plug rather than cutting the wire if at all possible."

The robin who, in the light, Jack can identify as Duke again, gives Bruce a wry little smile. It's not quite pleasant on his lips. He glances down at his communicator. "You get all that?"

"10-4," a tiny voice answers.

"Gee, Bruce," Jack says, throwing an elbow over his boyfriend's shoulder, "you're a natural, huh?"

Duke's wry grin becomes a grimace. "You two stay here," he tells them. "Civilians to the back."

"Hmmm," Jack says, watching the kid retreat. "I'm sensing some familiarity here."

"Just another person I've disappointed," Bruce mutters. "Come on, let's keep moving forward."

"Rebellious. I like it."

Bruce takes his hand, although it's not the most efficient way to move, and they advance.

"I feel like we could do more of this," Jack muses. "Adventuring. Venturing? I mean, you're a wealthy orphan and I'm your goofy but loveable companion, we're a recipe for syndication. We'd never run out of caves in this town, I'll tell you that much."

The lights cut out. In the ensuing blackness there is only the muzzle flash of firing guns, the faint blinking lights of dying circuits, and—most worryingly—a faint glow from the cavern behind them.

"They haven't brought down the ceiling yet," Bruce mutters. "Yes, they could catch more of the enemy unaware with the rock fall in the dark, but the chance of injuring an ally—"

Jack doesn't catch the rest. He's watching the growing glow behind them, green green green, watching as the liquid bioluminescent eye of Charybdis emerges above the rubble.

"Too late!" he says. He tightens his grip on Bruce's hand and rushes ahead, one hand against the wall to keep from getting too lost. The robins are noticing what he's noticed, all at once, and the sound of it is ugly. He trips over some mechanical guts in his haste, dragging Bruce down with him, and they tumble through a nest of wires still hot with loose sparks. Edges of warm metal tear through Jack's gloves and pop the skin underneath.

"Remind me to schedule a tetanus shot," Jack mutters, as he works his hands free. He's in pain, but the pain is coming to him like a shadow thrown against a curtain.

Charybdis levers herself into the room one monstrous shoulder at a time. Her green eyes roll, taking in the darkness and settling at last on the two figures closest to her reach. Jack swallows thickly. Bruce is still on the ground. From the sound of it he's trying to pry something much more painful from the wreckage than just his hand. As he struggles against the mess, Jack stands alone underneath the blazing attention of the creature before him. He is barely taller than her bent forearms, glittering and clinking with bangles. He peers up into her eyes, quick shuttering down the middle like double doors, and he thinks of shouting. Help would come. Those kids are fast ones. He's ninety percent sure they'd get to him before the enraged monster did, and he'd take that chance if it was just him, but as long as Bruce is on the ground—

He's unarmed. He kind of doubts bullets would make her anything more than angry, anyways.

The moment lasts a hundred years, as he stands below her, looking up into her mad alien eyes. It's crazy to feel kinship with a ten foot tall glowing predator, but that's what he feels. He has no idea what she wants. He has no idea where she comes from. But the monster in him recognizes her, her size and her power and her aloneness, and her mad green eyes.

"Good evening, madam," he says, taking a deep old fashioned bow.

Her sideways eyes blink-shutter. There's nothing for the most awful moment, and then like a switch flipping on, there is comprehension.

" _Yess_ ," she says, as if she is heaving words up from the depths of her lungs. " _It_ — _is."_

When the lights come on again, she has found somewhere else to be.

 **vi.**

Much later, in the ambulance parked below the cave entrance, Bruce accepts a shock blanket from a nervous EMT. Jack already has his tied around his neck like a cape, and his head laid in Bruce's lap. He holds his hands above his face, watching the blood spots that have spread over the ragged white cloth. He's reminded of Alfred's wine-stained napkin.

"Alfred said it was pretty bad," Jack says, quietly. "Me. Us."

Bruce runs a hand through the tangles in Jack's hair. He's watching the clean up with interest, his eyes particularly drawn to the confident figure of Duke the Robin, who spends as much time debriefing the commissioner as he does bodily dragging wounded henchmen out of the earth, throwing his hand in with the GCPD uniforms.

"Toxic," Jack adds, grimacing.

Bruce pauses.

A few feet away, someone is bagging the shattered remains of Scylla's helmet as evidence. Something tells Jack that Gotham hasn't seen the last of her or her monster yet. He wonders how loyal her henchmen are.

"This is really bothering you," Bruce says, in that thoughtful voice he uses to outline business problems.

"It oughta bother you too."

"I'm more bothered that Alfred told you and didn't bother to tell me. I don't know, Jack," Bruce says, "I don't know what to make of it either."

"I _know_ what to make of it," Jack says. He peels his gloves off one by one, breaking the seal of dried blood. "I've hurt you before. I don't want to hurt you again. I'm—Bruce, I'm terrified of hurting you again. I've always been so afraid of hurting, and now I'm starting to understand why…"

The thing is, he knows he should leave. He should leave before he does something he'll regret forever, but he's not selfless enough. He's not _good_ enough, not brave enough to inflict that kind of pain on himself. He presses his thumb to the wound in his palm, squeezing until blood starts to roll over the caked dust. Bruce gently pries his hands away from each other.

"You don't want to hurt me," Bruce says. "So don't," he says.

"You know it doesn't work like that," Jack says, pulling a face.

"I know it works like this," Bruce says. "You hurt me, I tell you so, you stop doing it. You do the same for me. Like real people, Jack. You and me."

"Real people," Jack echoes. Are they real people? Sometimes they feel like the only two real people in the world, and that's so dangerous. That's where madness starts.

"We get to decide who we are," Bruce reminds him. "We're not those people, if we don't want to be."

Jack says nothing for a while. It's hard to take your own advice.

"Hey. You were amazing with that monster," Bruce says, changing the subject. "How did you do that? You're the dragon whisperer."

"I think," Jack says, "with some monsters, they just want someone to see them."

"That so?"

Jack carefully folds his ruined gloves, and lays them beside his head. "Sure," he says. "It's hard to be alone in the world."

"I know," Bruce says, seriously. Then, leaning in, "But hey, that's why we've got each other, huh?"

Love overwhelms Jack, as fresh and bottomless as the first night he spotted Bruce in the yellow light of that overpass. I'm in love, he thinks. I am in love again, and again, and again. How could I know you and not love you? How could anyone? How could any me?

"Lucky thing," he agrees.


	4. I'm Just Falling Apart Again

i.

Jack lifts his hand to flip the sign on the shop to _open,_ and he pauses. He's remembered a dream, all at once, about the caverns of the earth and the light streaking across the sky, and he lifts his head up. The morning is breaking over them all, all the sleeping bodies and weary heads, and here he is, inside the strange ribcage of the city that doesn't want him but can't seem to let him go.

It's so quiet. For a moment, it seems that this peace must be the natural state of the world, although he knows all too well it isn't. Peace never lasts. His days of respite are numbered, numbers which are not known to him. But now, half awake and alone in the lavender wash of morning, he could almost believe that this moment will last forever.

Later, there will be action and excitement and bad coffee, but right now, there is only the cool white pulse of Venus on the horizon.

ii.

The moment he's reached the office, Jack says, in lieu of hello: "Can I use your computer?"

Today he's hanging out at the Wayne office while construction finishes outside of the butcher's shop. Three days prior, some telekinetic troublemaker had ripped up the sidewalk for a mile down their street during a pitched battle with a whole cohort of Robins—Jack had actually grabbed himself a coffee and spectated a bit, waving at the couple of kids he recognized as they swung overhead. The one called Damian, from the party months ago, deigned to stop by and check up on him during the wrap-up. He'd had an awful lot of questions about Bruce, about what he was doing and where he'd been lately and whether Jack had any reason to suspect something was wrong with him. Worrying stuff. Baseless, of course, because Bruce was just obsessing over R&D and taking his usual business trips like normal, but still worrying. Anyways, this is Jack's second day around the office and with one or two specific exceptions, it's been a surprisingly warm reception. At the moment he's helping Bruce's secretary print up a notice about the potluck luncheon coming up, which is apparently a thing that people who work in offices have periodically.

Bruce looks up from his work. His tie is loose and askew around his neck as the sheaves of papers settle around him in disorganized piles like a flock of perturbed geese. Instead of answering, he swivels the monitor around and pushes the keyboard across the desk, and goes back to desperately rifling through his R&D department's last fifteen years of quarterly reports. Like he's been doing for weeks.

Jack drags over one of the nice wooden guest chairs and pecks away at the keyboard for a minute, trying to get the effect just right on the screen. Bruce's obsession with the R&D department is starting to get the better of Jack's curiosity, but he's trying not to ask too many questions about it. Every time he brings it up, Bruce gets this weird blank look on his face that Jack is tempted to classify as guilt. Each time, Jack retreats. He's as loathe to shatter their quiet peace as he is absolutely dying of curiosity.

Jack strides through the hall, hands in pockets, nodding to various employees he's come to be acquainted with. Some of them even smile back. Bruce is fiercely loved in his offices—and is it any surprise? He's Gotham's golden child, and not a half bad boss to boot. A little of that love splashes over his cup and falls on Jack. At the printer station he hums some old song while the machine spits out hot paper, smelling comfortingly of singed plastic. When he turns, strategic marketing director Jerry Spight is leant up against the padded edge of the cubical, watching him.

"You're back," Jerry says, sipping green tea from a Styrofoam cup. "Two days in a row. You doing temp work now?"

"No, just," Jack casually flips his page around so the words are concealed against his hip, "helping Bruce out with a couple things."

Jerry gives the floor, his cup, and the printer a series of looks that concisely imply what _he_ thinks Jack is helping Bruce out with. It has nothing to do with printing. Jack bristles.

"How long's it been with you guys," Jerry asks, "six months?"

"Anniversary's in March," Jack agrees, although in his mind the beginning will always be that night on the overpass, the darkness and the light blazing down over Bruce like an alien halo, holy and terrible. He can close his eyes and be back there even now.

"Doing anything special?" Jerry asks. Jerry asks a lot of questions.

Jack shrugs self consciously. He knows Bruce will remember the date—Bruce remembers everything, dates no exception—and he knows that folks probably expect certain things from a boyfriend of his caliber. Hawaii or Cocomo or something. He's a little bit afraid of being surprised with something big like that. A little bit afraid of having to accept something like that, when he can barely afford a nice second hand watch at the pawn shop.

"You're a lucky guy," Jerry says. He sips his unsweetened green tea and wrinkles the corner of his mouth. "Somebody like you—once in a lifetime chance."

Jack smiles. "You mean cause I'm ugly?" he asks, "Or cause I'm poor?"

Jerry eyes him, not quite willing to commit to the blunt direction this conversation is going. Jack just keeps smiling. He pats the man's shoulder on his way out.

"If I did what a hundred whitebread socialites couldn't manage in twenty years, with this face," Jack says, "that almost qualifies as talent, don't you think?"

He turns the corner into the main hall and his smile immediately drops. "Please and thank you," he says, as he rips some tape off a passing dispenser. He circles the halls until he finds the elevator nearest Jerry's windowless office, and quickly scribbles a note in pen over the back of the sheet he'd printed. It's fine. He's not _hurting_ anybody. Once he's satisfied, he slaps his makeshift notice up next to the doors and tapes it in place.

It reads, entirely false but in big cheerful letters, "Thank you to Jerry Spight for providing Lunch for the office on Tuesday! Please leave your lunch orders on his desk by 4 PM Tomorrow."

He steps back and takes just a moment to appreciate his handiwork. Some days, he thinks to himself, some days are good days.

iii.

Jack carefully lays the newspaper across the counter, with the headline featuring a grainy photograph of the fugitive Scylla, and takes a sip of the office coffee. It's a little better than sludge. Doesn't seem to matter how nice the office is, everywhere he's been the communal coffee pot always tastes like hell.

One of the guys from the tech support wing looks up from the card game he's shuffling, which is not any kind of deck Jack recognizes, and glances over the headline. He makes a doubtful noise.

"They still haven't caught those freaks?"

Jack pauses in his quest for the comics, they change sections by the day of the week, and gives the headline a second look. It's mostly old news, as far as he can tell. There hasn't been a break in the case since the chaos days before, when the last sighting happened. Dead end. Disappeared like smoke. The article is basically just a speculation piece, wondering what the gang is really after.

"You know they got one of the company guys in the crossfire," techy joe says, tapping the photo with two fingers. "Down at the warehouse. Took one right through the neck."

Jack, who has heard Bruce quietly talking on the phone with the father of the deceased, says, "Yeah. I heard."

Techy, in his white collar and his hands full of colorful trading cards, says, "That's just how it is in this fucking city, I guess. I'd go to the funeral but I've already used up all my funeral leave for the year."

"I'm sure Bruce would give you clearance," Jack says, making a face at the dregs of his coffee.

The other man gives him a strange look. Suddenly those dregs aren't bothering him as much as this conversation is. Jack buries his face in his cup, to hide his unease. He knows that Bruce would-Bruce is going to the funeral himself, actually. There's a current of something almost like guilt that is running underneath every conversation Bruce has about it, every call he takes. It would probably make him feel better if he could do something helpful for one of his living employees. But maybe that was the wrong thing to say. He doesn't even really know this person, except by department.

"It'll be fine," the man says at last. He pushes the newspaper away and goes back to his cards, shuffling them in no particular way. "I'll send flowers or something."

Jack smiles uncertainly and stands up, eager to get away from this moment and all the unsaid things that he cannot parse. There's got to be something else he can do here. Something useful. At the very least, he could keep himself entertained.

What he's really dying to check out, he decides, are those R&D documents that Bruce is so obsessed with lately. Jack has always suspected there is something lurking beneath the surface of Wayne Enterprises. Maybe it's time to see the face of it.

But it's been remarkably difficult to get his hands on those documents, as it turns out. Bruce is pleasant but firm about confidentiality, and he never leaves them unattended on the table or in an unlocked drawer. The more Jack tries to get close to them, the more he realizes that Bruce is actively guarding them. After being thwarted for the umpteenth time this week, Jack is really at a loss. He doesn't want to be _nosey_ , it's just that he's... a little thin on patience.

He hardly notices that he's made it to the elevator until he's already on it. He studies the grid of buttons for a moment, first blindly and then with dawning interest. What if he…

Jack hits the button for the basement, and then rides the long trip down to R&D in a nervous fit. He has no idea what he's doing.

The hallway down here is sparse, when he steps off the elevator. They don't have the marble fixings of the office floor or the stylish steel minimalism of the lab floors. It's just a hallway, concrete and florescent lights, and at the end of it: a door.

Jack presses his hand against the scanner, but no dice. Down here there's not even a retinal, which is kind of weird. From the way Bruce was handling those documents, Jack expected high security. Could it be something as simple as embezzlement hiding in those papers, nothing truly strange or unusual at all? He can't get square with the idea. There is something in his bones that won't let him rest.

As he's tapping at the pad, looking for any buttons he could fiddle around with, the elevator slid open and revealed the shape of Lucius Fox, in the process of tugging his lab coat on.

"Oh," Lucius says. He comes down the hall at a brisk but unworried pace, hands in his pockets. "Mr… Ah, Jack, wasn't it?

Jack waves at him. "Lucius, buddy, how are you?"

"Living on caffeine, same as always," Lucius says. He seems a little taken aback at the familiar address, but he rallies quickly. Jack wants to apologize for the misstep, actually, but Lucius rallies so quickly there's no good place to do it, so Jack just… keeps smiling. You can't go wrong with a smile.

"What brings you down here?" Lucius says.

Jack glances up. "Bruce is driving me home," he says. And then, hit with a burst of inspiration, "But it feels like I'm underfoot today, so I thought I'd take a walk around and make myself scarce. You have a second to give a guy a tour?"

Lucius looks at him. Looks at him hard, and Jack is becoming belatedly aware of how suspicious he must sound when all at once Lucius gives him a shrug and plants his hand over the scanner.

"Alright," Lucius says. "I don't have a whole lot of time to squeeze you in, but you can have a look around if you like."

The door rolls back to show something that reminds Jack, inanely, of a tire store. It's got that rubber and grease smell, a room that looks darker than it is, light bouncing off the metal edges of cases all around. Jack darts into the thick of it before he can think twice, circling a display case at the center of the room which glows with blue electronic lights, a tower of folded metal behind glass.

"Ah," Lucius says, somewhere behind him, "the turbine battery. Just the prototype, of course. The first gen model is on display at a conference in Europe at the moment…."

Lucius says it in a particular hanging sort of way, like maybe he's waiting for Jack to ask more questions about it. But Jack wouldn't even know where to start, and anyways he's distracted by an actual tire on display at the back wall, over the sprawling holographic presentation table (which he ignores).

The treads are deep enough to hide several fingers and the circumference is enough to sit an eighteen-wheeler on, and there's something elegant about the shape of it all that fills Jack with a delightful déjà vu. He runs his fingers over the swoop and curve of the treads. The display shelf is on eye level with him, and when he looks up into it like this, he can almost feel—

"That one's a bit of a relic," Lucius observes. "Military tech moves fast. That model is already obsolete."

Jack traces the outline of a tred. "It was on the batmobile, wasn't it," he murmurs.

There's a change in the air. It only lasts a second, but it startles Jack out of his revere. He draws back his hand like he's afraid the rubber will burn him. When he turns to Lucius to apologize, though, Lucius looks the same as ever.

"I don't see how it could have been," the man says, hands in the pockets of his lab coats.

"Right," Jack says quickly, "sure, my mistake. I've never even seen the batmobile, come to think of it."

Lucius gives him a strange look. "What are you interested in?" he asks, leaning against the projection table. "I could give you a pinpoint tour, if you don't mind being in and out pretty quick."

Jack furrows his brows, puzzling it over. "What, uh," he says, "what is Bruce interested in?"

Lucius considers him for a moment, and then he crooks a finger for Jack to follow. He bustles over to a stacked shelf and digs out a scale model of a monorail car, which fills his arms like a big cat as he lifts it. "Bruce is always most interested in the city improvement projects," Lucius says.

Jack takes it into his arms like it really is a big animal, holding it close, warm with sudden affection for his boyfriend. He pets the glass over the tiny windows. Again he thinks to himself, how could I have doubted him? What was I expecting?

"Do you have a background in engineering?" Lucius asks, as he reaches over and flicks the switch to make the little motor run. The wheels chug right along.

"Not a bit," Jack says, poking at the wheels. "Couldn't wire my way out of a locked car."

"Not _even_ a car? You seemed pretty familiar with the x29 tred."

Jack pauses, in the middle of flicking the little model doors open and closed. "I dunno what I was thinking there. I just thought I remembered seeing it before."

"Maybe some other military vehicle," Lucius suggests. "We sold a lot of them five or six years back."

"Maybe," Jack says, thinking that the closest he'd ever been to a military vehicle was being kidnapped by Scylla and Charibdis months before. And he had no idea what that car looked like, because he'd been blindfolded.

No, the more he thinks about it, the more certain he is. He almost definitely remembers looking up into that tread pattern, like maybe—like maybe he was on the ground? Like maybe it almost ran him over? But the memory isn't scary. It's more like a happy memory. Like a Christmas morning memory. Not that he has any of those to compare it to.

"Anything else I can show you?" Lucius asks, which is funny because he'd seemed a lot more hesitant standing at the door five minutes ago.

Jack looks up at the ceiling, at the projector table, at the door to the back room. He feels kind of stupid for bothering Lucius now. How would he know what he was looking for in here, even if he found it?

"I'm good," he says. "Thanks for your time, Bubelah. I know you got work to do."

Lucius takes the model from his arms when he offers it, and puts it away. "You know Bruce has had a fair number of girlfriends over the years," he remarks, "but you're the first person to come down here in the flesh."

"Huh," Jack says. "You'd think they woulda taken more of an interest."

"Bruce knows which kinds of people take an interest," Lucius says, with a meaningful look over his glasses.

"Yeah?" Jack says, not sure what he's supposed to be picking up here.

"Bruce might seem a bit carefree and spoiled," Lucius says, "but he knows more than people think."

"You sure you're allowed to call your boss spoiled?" Jack says, uneasily.

"Come back any time," Lucius says, pressing the button to open the heavy door. "But don't expect to find anything."

Jack inches out the door, not quite sure what direction this conversation has derailed in.

"And next time?" Lucius says. "Get a guest pass."

The door slides shut.

iv.

"How many pairs of, _ha,_ handcuffs do you, pfff, own?"

Bruce side-eyes him from the other side of the bedroom. Jack keeps giggling as much because it's funny as because he's too wound up to be silent. He opens and closes his fingers inside the locked cuff. It glitters cold and silver in the rainy evening light pouring through the balcony window. He pulls against it. If he pulled hard enough, he imagines, it could cut a messy line through his arteries and bleed him right out, right onto Bruce's sheets. Empty him all across this beautiful king sized bed.

He shivers. Those kinds of sudden bloody thoughts can't hurt him here, safely closed away in Bruce's home, with cuffs clipped tight around his wrists. He hopes.

"Are you sure you're alright?" Bruce asks.

"Why wouldn't I be?" Jack asks, licking his dry lips.

"Because you keep tugging on those," Bruce says, nodding towards Jack's wrist.

Jack pauses in the middle of rattling the left one. "Just testing the merchandise, darling."

"Are you _sure_ you want me to get your ankle?"

The last set of cuffs swings from Bruce's finger, flashing and glinting like something forbidden. Jack swallows automatically, unable to take his eyes away. "Yeah," he says.

Bruce has barely unbuttoned his shirt, which is probably his tacit way of saying that he's ready to stop any time he needs to, but all it's doing right now is making Jack squirm against the sheets. He wants Bruce big and powerful and strong over him, no more affected by anything Jack does than by a passing thought. They compromised on the one ankle. Jack was thinking about more, Jack has been thinking about this for months, Jack has thought about this every time Bruce laid those hands across his throat in the heat of the moment, when he was too far gone to remember that's not how you should hold a lover. Every time sparks burst behind Jack's eyes, deep in his fluttering lungs, he thought of this.

" _Bruce_ ," he says. "Come down here, darling, come down to me."

Bruce plants a knee between Jack's legs and leans down, running a hand through Jack's hair, brushing it back off his forehead.

"You can pull that," Jack says, pushing his head up into Bruce's touch.

Bruce winds his fingers through Jack's hair and clenches tight, watching Jack sigh and chew his lip. Jack tries to turn his face away from the intensity of it, but without saying anything, Bruce holds him firmly in place.

"You're, uhah, pretty quick on the uptake, darling," Jack says. One of his eyes is shut against the twist of pain, and it's at least something between himself and Bruce's unbreaking stare. It's wonderful and terrible, an eclipse that should never be viewed with bare eyes.

"I love you," Bruce says.

Jack jerks like he's been slapped. His breath catches. It feels wonderful and terrible, eclipse dangerous. _You do?_ Jack wants to ask him, even though he he's heard it before and he knows it, or he should know it. _Tell me again. Say it again._

"Sweetheart," he manages, "please."

"How do you want me to touch you?" Bruce asks, already moving his hand down the birdcage arc of Jack's chest.

"Doesn't matter," Jack says. "However you want."

Bruce snorts. "Thank you for that complete non-answer. Come on, Jack. Tell me what you want."

It's probably because Bruce chooses that moment to mercilessly squeeze the inside of Jack's thigh that Jack loses his cool badly enough to say, "Tell—tell me again."

Bruce pauses. "What do you want me to tell you?"

Jack rolls his eyes over to the safe darkness of the closet, where he can almost ignore Bruce watching him. "The," he says, "the love thing."

"I love you?" Bruce says, tilting his head.

Jack presses his lips together and nods.

"I love you," Bruce says, and then with more certainty, "I love you."

Jack shivers. He pulls tight on the cuffs, trying to ground himself here, in this moment, in this room. He thinks automatically about arteries and wet gushing cuts again, but it's okay because Bruce is on top of him, holding him down—no matter what he thinks, it can't get past Bruce. No matter what Jack wants or doesn't want or doesn't know if he wants, Bruce will hold him still, here, in place. All of it, the ugly and the confused and the dangerous, he can give it all up to Bruce.

"Again?" he whispers.

Bruce closes his fist around Jack's cock, hot and tight. "I love you," he says. He leans in, pressing a kiss to Jack's lips. His grip is only a shade away from hurting, and Jack wants all of it. He wants everything. God, he wants everything, it's eating him alive.

"Again," Jack says.

"Love you," Bruce says.

"Ah—again—"

v.

Jack wakes up to the sound of Bruce shouting at Alfred. It's a ways deeper into the house, but on a morning like this it's so quiet inside the mansion that Jack, with his ever sharp ears, can still make out the muffled edges of it. He comes rolling out of bed and pulls on one of Bruce's shirts without much thought, yawning. His sleepy morning autopilot is telling him to go to where the sound is. _It's probably about me_ , he thinks, feeling more exhausted than he should after a whole six hours of uninterrupted sleep.

At the edge of the kitchen, Jack slumps against the door frame and gives everyone a bleary hello wave. "What's the commotion?" he says, eyes drifting from the uneaten toast on the counter to Bruce's pinched expression and crashing to a sudden halt on the stranger behind Alfred. The fumes of some uncomfortable and inscrutable moment drift over them all.

"Uh," Jack says. He is very awake now. "Sorry—am I interrupting something?"

The man leaning at the counter gives him a bemused once-over, horn rimmed glasses slipping down over his nose. He has a boxy look to him, like somebody hung a sky-blue suit jacket on one of those football tackle dummies. Then he pauses, with his eyes over Jack's chest, and shoots Alfred an urgent probing look. Alfred pressed his lips together and turns, deliberately, away. Some dire conversation is passing silently between them, far beyond Jack's reckoning.

"I should go," Jack says, all at once self-conscious about whatever it was the huge stranger was looking at. His shirt? Oh god, _Bruce's_ shirt.

"It's fine," Bruce sighs. He slides his uneaten toast across the counter top, on a paper napkin of course because Bruce never has time for plates. "Mr. Kent, this is Jack. Like I was saying earlier, it might have been better to meet at the office. We weren't expecting visitors."

"I'm sorry for the intrusion," Kent says. He sounds genuinely apologetic, and warm, and slightly Midwestern around the vowels. He turns his attention to Jack again. "I was just answering a call that your—boyfriend?"

Jack nods, heart pounding.

"That your boyfriend made earlier this morning. He's looking to get back into an old business venture—?" This time Kent looks at Bruce for confirmation.

"Considering it," Bruce says, carefully. "You don't need to bore Jack with the details. We can talk about this later, in a more professional setting. Jack, you can go back to bed. I'll be up in a moment."

Jack lingers uneasily for a moment, watching the silent stalemate between Alfred and Bruce—their cat-rigid wariness—and Kent's considering, almost sympathetic otherness. There's something heavy in this room, something secret that no one wants Jack to be a part of. For a moment, Jack thinks, _he's cheating on me._ But that thought is gone as soon as it appears. Bruce is too good for something like that, to honorable. It has to be something else.

"Right," Jack says. "Okeedokie. I'll just… go."

It's something about Wayne Enterprises, Jack is almost certain of it. It's a secret that belonged to Bruce before the accident, the insects' eggs floating just beneath the surface.

Jack shuffles back through the halls, running his fingers through his messy hair. But what could Bruce want so badly to keep from him? From Jack, of all people, who is hopelessly devoted—of all the people on this earth, _Jack,_ who would walk out into the desert and never be seen again if Bruce only were to ask him for it.

There's a sound of throat clearing. Jack startles, twists to find Mr. Kent standing just a few feet behind him, looking apologetic.

"Sorry," Kent says, with a wry shrug. "I'm told I'm pretty light on my feet for someone my size."

Jack at least tries to look like he's relaxed. The paranoia is butting in, with its own ideas about what is going on here, but- He reminds himself that this is Bruce's house. Anyone who wants to take him away will have to go through Bruce first. Or at least—god, he _hopes_ so.

"You seem," Kent says, and frowns as if he's not quite sure what he means, "…happy here."

"Well hey," Jack says, sliding back a step, "who wouldn't be?"

"He can't stay like this forever," Kent says. "You understand that, don't you? We've all tried at one point or another, and it never works. And when it happens, I just want to know… what will you do?"

Jack's paranoia abruptly switches directions. No, this isn't someone here to commit him. This is someone here to undo his uneasy peace, to scoop those eggs up to the surface where they can finally suck their first greedy breaths. He runs his fingers through his hair and pulls them tight, curling in on himself.

"Why _can't_ he?" Jack asks. "Why can't we stay like this?"

"There are people who need us," Kent says. He says it softly, like a parent to a distressed child. "At the end of the day, Bruce won't be able to ignore people in need. Training or not, it isn't in his nature. I wouldn't expect you to understand."

"But—" Jack mutters, "but _I_ need him. I love him. Aren't I enough?"

Kent stiffens. He draws back, and then he reaches forward, his hand hovering uncertainly in the dimness, in the sunlight leaking under the heavy closed doors, the dust never quite purged from the air. "Ah," he says. "I think—I never understood what it was with him and you. I think I just got it."

Jack looks up, from between his fingers. "You recognize me?" he says, surprised and not surprised. It seems like everyone knows him better than he knows himself.

"Obviously," Kent says, lifting an eyebrow. He taps the space over his heart. "That's familiar too, but your face hasn't changed _that_ much _._ And I know all about familiar faces."

Jack stops, slides his hand down his forehead, touches the skin beneath his eye with his fingertips. His face?

Kent sighs. "Part of me still thinks—for what you did to us, there at the end—there ought to be consequences." He looks tired now, with his wide shoulders and his big unfashionable glasses and his model-perfect skin. "But you were always Bruce's problem, and I wouldn't even know where to start."

"You must have been friends," Jack says, trying not to sound so jealous, "if he told you about me."

Kent pauses. He narrows his eyes uncertainly behind his glasses. " _If_ he—" Kent breaks off. "You know who I am, don't you? The box, with the toxin—it was mailed to Clark Kent, I _know_ you know."

"I'm sorry," Jack says, "did you say I _mailed_ you—?"

"No, hold on," Kent says, waving a hand. "Your heartbeat—are you telling me you actually don't remember?"

"Bruce and I were in the same accident. Everything from before that is just… gone."

Kent pulls back into himself. He cups a hand over his lips, brows pinched. Jack is just trying to catch up, trying to understand. So many people seem to know him, and yet, no one ever came forward. It's been almost a year since the accident, and not a single person has come forward to claim him. He digs his nails into his arms, drawing red welts up through the pale skin. Bruce's people seem to know him, but only tangentially—it's as if he only existed in Bruce's shadow. He feels like a ghost. He feels like a paper man.

"Do you _know?_ " Kent says. He's staring hard at Jack now, some deep but inscrutable emotion on his face. "Has anyone _told_ you?"

Jack's vision starts to blur. He realizes belatedly that his body is shaking. He watches the expression on Kent's face morph from apprehension to concern without understanding it, as the world goes hollow around him. Paper people. Paper house.

"I'm getting Bruce," Kent says. Jack blinks and then he's gone, and he doesn't want to think about how he's losing time now, too, but his brain won't stop looping over and over, _you're losing time you're losing time_

Bruce races in ahead of Kent by several seconds, catches him around the back and pulls him in.

"I'm fine," Jack says, teeth chattering, "I'm fine."

Bruce pulls away just enough to look over his shoulder. "What did you say to him?" he demands, clutching the back of Jack's head like he's holding it together.

"I… don't know," Kent says. "I don't think I understand anything about this."

Bruce makes an irritated noise deep in his throat. Jack shies away from it automatically, but he's held tight, he has nowhere to move. "You should go," Bruce tells Kent. "Alfred will show you out."

Kent winces, but he has enough grace to back away, retreating carefully from the scene. He gives Jack one last glance, regretful and confused, and then he ducks through the door and is gone.

"I can't do this," Jack mutters into Bruce's shoulder, "I can't keep…."

Jack buries his face in Bruce's shoulder. He breathes in pajama shirt smell, fingers clutching at the fabric over Bruce's shoulder blades, and thinks about what Kent said. They can't stay like this. They can't live like this.

There's only one path left to him. Jack looks up at the man he loves, has loved, will die loving. He can't live like this. They can't live like this. He has two options, and only one of them offers a chance of this life, the life Bruce is offering him. The other is always waiting for him, at the bottom of the river, and he hopes to god he never has to go back there again.

Bruce never ought to know about this. Bruce should carry on in the sunlight, unburdened with such awful things. Jack will take one more darkness into himself, back into himself, and hope that this will be enough to end it once and for all.

There are things he needs to know. He's ready to find out. He'll have to be.

vi.

The skyline of Gotham is gorgeous even in the bitter grey chill of winter, the chop of the bay sparkling with rare bursts of sunlight. Jack stands on the roof of the Wayne building and looks down at it all, hands in the pockets of his heavy wool coat. Wind whips at the tails of it, tugging his hair out of its deliberate coif, sinking chill fingers into his collar where a scarf would go if he owned one. He is white and the world is grey, and titanic, the scale of it breathtaking from this vantage point.

What does he know?

Scarecrow recognized him. Scarecrow seemed to think he had fallen somehow, been reduced by his circumstances. A nobody like Jack. Where could he have fallen from that a creature like _Scarecrow_ would find it remarkable?

Far below him, the cranes are unloading cargo at the docks, toy sized crates from toy sized boats. What else does he know?

Alfred knew him. Alfred said he was toxic, intimately toxic. He hurt Bruce somehow. Who could he have been that he had the power to hurt a man like Bruce? Up until now he has been drawing away from the thought each time, like a thing that burns at the touch, afraid of what it meant. Would he have—could he have—?

The worst case scenario, the scene he can't hold in his mind for more than a moment: a dimly lit room, his shape bearing down on Bruce's helpless form, the whisper of—blackmail, perhaps, before the lamp light clicks off once and for all. Whatever secret Bruce's past hides, perhaps it was not always such a secret to Jack.

But that doesn't seem quite right either! Jack paces the length of the roof, kicking aside rusted keys and what look like broken batarangs, which he isn't sure how he knows the look of but he clearly does. How does Scarecrow fit into it? Alfred and even Clark Kent, it would explain them, but it doesn't explain Arkham's most notorious doctor-turned-patient.

Jack stops abruptly. He watches the white smoke rolling up from the factory to the east almost without seeing it. Had he been an inmate there at some point? But, then, where are his _records?_

The city is so huge and heavy against the earth. In the brief time he has tried to make a home of it, it has been like a body full of fever trying to burn him out. He has always thought of it as alien somehow, hostile to him as he walked its streets, but he has to admit… From up here, from this angle? With all the people reduced to shadows on the concrete, the alleys and secret corners exposed to the sky? It makes him almost nostalgic for something. It almost seems like home.

There's something he's not seeing. If he could just go higher, he thinks, if there was a way to go a little higher—to look down at all of himself like an eye among the stars, like a figure in a photograph...

vii.

Jack rises to the morning light outside Bruce's wide window, knowing that he can't go home like this. His home will swallow him alive. He lays his head in the downy curve of a pillow and watches Bruce winch down the silk knot at his throat, grimacing at his reflection. That's the nicest suit Bruce owns short of an actual tux, and with the black shirt underneath it, his effect is as dour as the threat of snow over Gotham.

"Do you attend all your employees' funerals?" Jack asks him.

Bruce frowns, not at Jack but at the figure in the mirror and the burning grey sky behind him. "Technically I employ something like a fourth of the city, so unfortunately no, that would be impossible."

"You're sure you don't want company?" Jack asks, closing the eye that is squished against the pillow. "There's still time for me to put something nice on."

Bruce shakes his head. "You don't need to do that. It'll only make you feel worse."

Sadly, that's most likely true. Jack has never been to a funeral before, and the idea of looking down into that muddy pit in the earth—the suits and hats, the silent tears, all that _black—_ fills his stomach with a shameful dread. But he _wants_ to go, to be there for Bruce, the way Bruce always is for him.

"Besides which," Bruce says, grimly, "if it hadn't been for me, Scylla would never have been there."

Jack doesn't know if _that's_ true or not. Scylla seems to be a kind of creeper vine groping up through the city these last couple months, as relentless as she is inscrutable. Cops can't keep her out. Robins can't keep her down. It's true that she only strikes places connected with Bruce, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily _him_ she cares about. It could just be his money, or his company, or any number of things which would remain in place if Bruce Wayne CEO was changed out for some other warm body. It's unfortunate that people keep getting caught in the crossfire, but Bruce's fault that does not the thing make.

Bruce comes over and bends down at the edge of the bed, pressing a kiss into Jack's messy hair. Jack lifts his hand, fingertips lingering over the classical edge of Bruce's square jaw, the freshly shaved skin. With his dark hair, Bruce's face will show a 5 o'clock shadow well before noon, but you wouldn't guess it right now.

"I love you," Jack says. "I wish I could show it better."

Bruce closes his hand over Jack's, smiling faintly into the touch. "If you loved me any harder I think you might emit radio waves."

Jack brightens. "I could give it a try."

After Bruce is gone, Jack is left alone in the bedroom watching the grey winter sky, the smile slowly falling away from his lips. He should lie back down and try to catch up on his sleep deficit; the only time he ever seems to sleep well is when he stays over at the mansion. But he's been here for a couple days now and his body is used to scraping by with far less, and he is restless. All of his questions, all of his worries—alone in the grey silence of the magnificent old bedroom, they are crawling inevitably towards him.

Instead, he moves quietly through the mansion, laying new eyes on the endless hallways, some of them familiar, some of them not. He inspects every photograph, of which there are precious few. The one of Bruce with the little black-haired boy. Grayson, Jack now assumes. The enormous portrait of the late Waynes, overlooking the parlor with ghostly benevolence. He spends a long time considering Martha Wayne's mysterious little smile. He feels that she knows something, something sad. The kind of sad that you just have to laugh at.

It must be a pain to dust in here. The old boy's not as spry as he used to be. Why don't they hire a maid to do all that, it's not as if they don't have the money. Right?

Jack runs his hands over the cool marble skull of some philosopher he'll almost certainly never be able to name. His fingers itch too, now, with the same suppressed panic that has been building in him for a day now. What is he looking for? Will he know it when he finds it?

Underneath the splashes of new life in this room, there are the dusty underpinnings of the Bruce who lived here before the accident. Delicate velvety bodies of bats tacked down under glass, wings splayed for analysis. Obscure texts by long dead scientists. Jack looks again to the Mona Lisa smile of Martha Wayne, searching for some answer in her spectral face. The Bruce of before strikes him as a kind of Byronic figure, forever pacing the walls of this gloomy parlor. He grows monolithic and strange in his seclusion. In his sadness. Jack can sure imagine where that sadness might come from. Maybe the R&D papers can tell him nothing that Martha's strange smile cannot. Maybe there's nothing behind Bruce but this sadness.

He lifts his fingers. Maybe he is imagining it all. A cold uncertainty runs through him, as he overlooks the room. Maybe all he's sensing is his own guilt crystalizing between them, growing stronger with each person who seems to know more about him than he knows about himself. He drops into the chair behind the desk, groaning, and spins absently.

As he drifts to a stop, he spots a business card wedged underneath one of the eccentric little paperweights. It's Kent's. He's a journalist, Jack knows now, which explains how he knew just the wrong things to say. As he picks it up, Jack eyes the half-open door to the parlor. Bruce clearly didn't want him involved in whatever Kent is investigating, but every instinct is screaming at him that these things are one and the same—Bruce's secrets, his vague warnings, Kent's connection to them both.

Jack pockets the card before he can convince himself not to, and quickly leaves the parlor behind.

viii.

Alfred drove Bruce to the funeral. Jack knows this, and yet he tiptoes through the house as if the wrong creak on the ancient floorboards will summon the old boy from nothing. In the kitchen, thinking of Bruce frowning behind the counter, all their tense ghosts looming over cheerful yellow cabinets, Jack pulls down the phone from the wall and punches in Kent's number.

He doesn't pick up on the first ring. Jack doesn't know why he expected that-most people wouldn't-but he wraps the old rubber phone cord around his fingers in nervousness anyhow. Each coil obscures a little more of his knuckle, until the skin is gone entirely from view. He hates making calls.

A click. "This is Clark Kent," the familiar baritone says.

Breath whooshes out of Jack's chest like it's got a mind of its own, and for a moment he really cannot speak. Kent doesn't hang up, or say anything actually. He just waits patiently, like he's used to this kind of thing. Maybe he is. Maybe this is just something that happens with journalists.

Jack swallows. "Hey, there, uh. This is Jack, from the… kitchen, the other morning."

Silently squeezing the hell out of the phone cord, Jack wonders what the _fuck_ is wrong with him.

There's a little airy sound, but he doesn't know what it means. "Oh," Kent says, pretty neutral sounding. "Hello again. I'm sorry if I made things difficult for you and Bruce. I was under a… mistaken assumption, at the time."

Jack sinks an incisor into his lip. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about," he says.

There's a pause from Kent's end, and then something that is definitely a sigh. "I don't think Bruce would like me to discuss this with you right now," he says. "I should go."

"No no no," Jack says, hunching over the countertop, clutching the receiver with both hands. "Don't, please. I know something was going on, okay, please, besides Alfred so far I've had two people say they knew me before and one of them was a _supervillain,_ Mr. Kent, and the other one was you. I don't understand. I need to understand."

"You need to," Kent says, slowly.

Jack gestures erratically at the air, for all the good it will do him. "You said that we can't live like this forever and you were _right_ , you were right, something has to give. Sometimes when I can't sleep at night I can almost feel the terrible thing getting ready to hatch—I can feel it in my bones. Scratching. I'm tired of living in fear, Mr. Kent."

"Do you know who I am?" Kent asks him, after a moment.

"No," Jack says, wretchedly. "A writer? I've never read your column."

"Do you know who Bruce is?"

That one Jack takes longer to answer, running his tongue over the sharp edge of his teeth. In a way he feels as if he does know-the shape if not the name, at least. The monster that lurks beneath the surface, like and unlike the monster which lives beneath Jack's own bed. "Isn't being Bruce enough?" he asks.

"Look," Kent says, gently, "it's not my place to tell you any of this. Maybe you have a right to know your own secrets, but your secrets are all tangled up with everyone else's."

"But," Jack says.

"You're not an island, Jack, no matter how much you may feel like one right now. Your life is wound up in the lives of more people than you can possibly know."

"That can't be right," Jack says, slumping onto his elbows. "I'm nobody. I was born nobody."

A small sound, like a pen being capped. "John Doe," Kent says, "in my experience, there's no such thing as a nobody."

Jack looks down at his shadow on the milky white tile.

"Take a step back," Kent advises him. "I often find when I'm stumped on a story that my problem is perspective. Pull back the camera, but don't lose sight of the bodies in the rubble."

The bodies in the rubble. John looks up, at the refrigerator, where one of his doctor's appointment reminders hangs from the magnets. When had he made himself so much a part of this house? When did he become part of anyone else's life?

"Please," he says, softly. "Please, Mr. Kent. If I have sins to atone for, don't I deserve to know what they are?"

There's a tense moment of consideration, a held breath. It sounds like he's chewing on something, maybe a pen. The sun that pours in through the east window is hot across Jack's hunched shoulders.

"You were the Joker, John. You do know who that is, don't you?"

In the perfect, white hot silence that follows, Jack is a fracturing mirror, blood on glass, a thousand nauseous eyes blinking in simultaneity as they crack and spill across his mind. He looks up, into the black reflection of the microwave door, which is the oldest appliance in the kitchen and which he _knows_ will burn popcorn if you put it in on the popcorn setting and how could _he_ , how could _that_

No. No, but also—yes, he can see it now, the ghost of that smile on his own face, a hundred mornings with a kerchief pressed to his face to avoid the uneasy looks of strangers in the shop. Newsreels, pop psych pieces on the afternoon news, posters outside the precinct. Their eyes are the same.

He reaches out, but his fingers can't reach the dim reflection of his own pale eyes.

Kent said toxin, he _did_ say that, and Jack didn't know what to do with that word so he put it away, but that _was_ the word. Scarecrow—well of course Scarecrow would know him, and there would _be_ no records, there had never _been_ any records of...

"Are you still there?" Kent asks him, like he's testing the waters in a dangerous reef.

"Yes," Jack says, mouth dry. "I'm—I'm trying to understand."

Kent sighs. "Under normal circumstances, I'd rather not throw this at Bruce while so much is in the air, but… look, you need to talk to him about this. It's a conversation that needs to happen. Before he goes any further."

Did Bruce know? Could he have known the whole time? But how would he know, and why would—why would Clark _Kent_ know? None of this is coming together the way he thought it would, this is so much worse than not knowing anything. What would be worse, if Bruce already knows, or if Jack has to _tell_ him?

"Yes," Jack says, "yes I—I think we should talk."

ix.

Jack takes the elevator up to Bruce's floor of the Wayne Building. People come and go like flurries of birds rising up around his feet, faceless and voiceless, as he stands silent in the middle of it all. In the course of a morning he's crossed over from acute anxiety to tranquil, distant nothingness. He is a ghost in his own body, watching his feet step out of the elevator, his shoes cross gash in the floor which is so slim but so so deep, deep enough that you could remember a whole lifetime in the time it would take you to fall its length, if you had a lifetime to remember.

He is vaguely aware that he should be trying to figure out what to say to Bruce, but he cannot think of anything. Nothing. For the first time since he woke up nerve-wracked and heart-spiking in that hospital room last year, his mind is silent. And then, like the static sound flooding back into a broken speaker, he's shaken back to life.

The building rattles under his feet. Jack skids across the hardwood, hands grabbing at nothing, as smoke that smells faintly of pancakes billows up through the elevator doors behind him. What? He rushes to the nearest window and peers down, through more smoke, to find glass on the street. An attack. What time is it? What time was the funeral supposed to end? If Bruce is back, already, or would he have stayed behind to shake hands? Would he have come straight back?

The hallway blurs around Jack, the sound of his heart in his ears, or his heels on the floor, incomprehensible. He throws open the door to the private section, where Bruce's office is, and races through the hall. Empty thank god. This high off the ground they don't have many options, the elevator is probably already crowded with people on the lower floors, and the stairwell, yes, but it's a long way down-

Jack bursts into the perfect silence of Bruce's office. Through the panorama window, he can see smoke curling up and away, pale and meaningless. Not a single paper is ruffled on the wide desk, not a paperweight out of place. Jack sags, into the doorframe, and lets himself discard the fear which gripped him most. Bruce isn't back yet. Whoever they are, they haven't even gotten here.

Jack ghosts across the floor of the office, gloves brushing lightly against the photograph of himself and Bruce under the silver lights of that charity Gala, as the building shakes beneath him. The frame wobbles and he steadies it with one finger, automatically. In a moment he'll take the stairwell down to safety. In a moment-

He feels more than hears the doors to the floor wrenched open. He turns, alone against the white length of window, and looks into the enormous green eyes of a familiar monster. They blink, sideways shuttering, in the frame of the doorway.

"Gree-ting-s," she says, her voice like a stone dropped into a well, whispery and improbably deep. "I remem-ber-you."

Jack sways, like a dreamer who cannot wake, and watches the slow catlike twitch of her endless corded muscles. He feels his mouth opening. "Good afternoon, Madam," he says. "I'm afraid Bruce isn't back yet."

Because there is nowhere to go, and because Jack is a creature of manners, when Scylla's jackbooted crew arrive to tear the room apart, Jack stands aside and waits. It's not clear what they're searching for, knocking over busts and ripping books from the shelves, but they are entirely uninterested in the papers across the desk or even the very expensive art hung over the walls. In the whirlwind of destruction Scylla finally arrives, teeth even more gruesome than Jack remembers chalk-painted over the black mirror of her helmet. She surveys the room at military attention, standing so still that the yellowed teeth sewn into the hem of her leather jacket don't even click against each other. Mostly, they don't _look_ human. Small mercies.

She presses the palm of her hand to her visor and pulls it away, revealing a face that claws Jack's belly with nausea. He pressed himself against the window glass, sinking his teeth into his gloves, and tries to breathe deep. It's not just disgust. Jack is a butcher, he's seen meat and muscle at every stage of undress.

The flesh of her cheeks is eaten away in blackened vignettes, revealing the pearly molars underneath, flashing out from the shadow, perfect as a doctor's display. It's not just disgust that makes him feel as if he is seeing double, two visions overlaid and pushing through each other—it's the facsimile of a smile, the tortured fleshless grin. It is Wrong.

"You," she says. He looks up and realizes he's made a spectacle of himself, cringing away from her like a child in a freak show. "You were at the Gala."

Well now that's all coming back fresh and shiny in his memory. Jack tugs his collar, wincing. "No hard feelings about the whole shooting you thing, I hope?"

She doesn't look at him any particular kind of way. "I had forgotten," she says.

"Oh," Jack says. "Good?"

She comes over to him. Up close he can see that she's got one of those faces that look tired no matter what you do to them, permanent dark circles under her bare eyelids. She takes him by the face, hard and impersonal. She looks back at the photograph on the desk, the champagne and silver night of the Gala, before everything went wrong—in the photo you can just see the tight edge to Jack's smile, as he anticipates the wreckage the night will leave in its wake.

"The lover," she says, as if she has finally remembered something. "Where is your gun, lover boy?"

Jack's hand closes over the hard shape in his pocket, and he wonders if it would do him any more good this time than it did him last time. He's close enough, he could get it into her stomach and probably _probably_ pull the trigger before she could knock it out of his hands. She may assume he's unarmed, because he hadn't tried anything when the enormous creature poked her head through the door earlier.

She grins at him. It's sickening.

"What do you think," she calls out, eyes flicking back for a fraction of a second. "Charybdis?"

Through the door, Jack can just make out the massive shape of a knee folded up, as the monster rests her considerable bulk against the other side of the wall. There's a faint jangling, bangles jostling each other on her wrists and ankles, and then Charybdis says, "Take-him."

Jack's hand moves. The flat of a hand cracks over his wrist, the smell of gunpowder, ears ringing as the blast obliterates all sound but the shrill whine of silence, plaster blows out in a cloud: all of these things in a single moment, and then Jack is lying disarmed on the floor, with his arm wrenched up behind his back. He screws his eyes shut as Scylla digs her steel toe into his spine.

"Pretty fast," she says. "Not fast enough."

Jack sweats and grits his teeth, knots of carpet digging up into his cheek. "You're not gonna get any money out of this," he manages, "this is Gotham. The robins will come for you." His breath stutters as his shoulder gives a shrill throb of pain. "Bruce," he gasps, "will come for you."

He doesn't know why he says it. What could Bruce do against a small army like this one, even as smart and as strong as he is, what could any one man do here? And anyway, why should Bruce do anything himself when there are people he could send instead? But Jack has sat in the darkness with Bruce, in the cavern darkness below the earth, and he has lifted Bruce from the collapsing tunnel wreckage of that same darkness, and he has seen the way Bruce grows to fill that fearful space. In his bones, he knows that Bruce will come.

For a moment Scylla says nothing. Then, as the cold click of handcuffs close around Jack's wrist, and the pain in his shoulder dissipates, she says, "Good". She drags him up by the collar, unwavering grip even as he slips and stumbles, disoriented. She marches him out, past her militia, and holds him out to Charybdis.

"Will you carry him, please?" she asks.

Charybdis reaches out with one of her terrible claws, palm as wide as Jack's middle, and closes her whole hand around him. Her nails press into his spine.

Jack licks his lips nervously. "Isn't," he says, "uh, isn't Scylla supposed to be the monster?"

Scylla doesn't spare him a backwards glance as she fits her visor back into place, the rows of chalk teeth like the inside of a shark's jaws, concentric gaping circles. Charybdis draws him in, stronger than gravity but almost gentle, and gives him a look that could be mistaken for a smile.

"She-is."

x.

To his surprise, when the bag comes off his head, they are back in the caverns beneath Gotham. The darkness isn't so bad after having a bag over his head-which was plastic, and scared the hell out of him before he realized they weren't trying to suffocate him after all. Other than that the ride was pretty uninteresting. He talked to the guard about his plans for the weekend. Made a list of his favorite black and white films. Had a hysterical breakdown when he remembered what he was right in the middle of ranking _Sunset Boulevard_.

The vault of the cavern is high above him, dim with light from the lanterns across the walls. It must be a different one though, because he doesn't see any of the damage from months ago scarred into its stone. Scylla pays him no attention as she sweeps through the bustle, none of the enormous motherboards of the previous site but plenty of crates being carried in and out.

Charybdis, comfortable on her palms and bent legs like a strange ape, folded into the tight space here, nudges Jack forward.

"So what's your story, Carrie," he asks her, as she hooks a nail into the back of his coat and lifts him over a shadow that turns out to be a deep divot in the stone. "You seem like a girl who has a past."

"Charybdis is older than you will ever be, Lover-boy," Scylla says, without turning from the manifesto she is checking off item by item. "Her story is the story of temples brought down around the ears of boys like you."

"Really," Jack says, craning his neck to look back at her. "You're pretty fit for your age, darling."

"I was born-to swallow the bones-of the here-tic."

"Yeesh," Jack says. "Fun little atmosphere you all have going here."

They pass by a dark chamber, and as the lantern passes, light tangles in a kind of dark smoke just beyond the entry way. It reflects slithering light back up at them, a sly flicker in the depths. Charybdis catches him rubbernecking and firmly pushes him onward. He gives a little _oof_ and stumbles.

"So this is a kind of cult?" Jack asks. They're awfully tightlipped around here. If he was running an operation of this size, he'd be _excited_ to talk about it.

"It absolutely is not," Scylla says sharply. "We are a coalition of likeminded individuals working together to rectify what has been wronged in the natural order. And we offer a living wage."

Jack nods, thoughtfully. "So this is like a... justice kind of thing, then? Take out the one percent and let the folks at the bottom get a little of the sunshine?"

Scylla snorts. "It's none of our concern who has or doesn't have _sunshine._ Too much is at stake to worry about such small lives."

"Oh," Jack says. He knows he sounds disappointed. If it was something like that, some kind of radicalized social justice situation, he knows Bruce could negotiate through that. Bruce would be _sympathetic_ to that. "I think you lost me," he says.

Charybdis makes a soft noise behind him. "Show-him," she says, "the Plouto-nion."

Scylla stops entirely and whirls, pulling her visor free. "Show _him?_ " she says. "This little pawn? This pale little nothing? You want to show _him?_ "

Charybdis crouches forward, above Jack, and slips her monstrous finger under his chin. She tips his face so it catches the light in a different way, the curve of her thumb cradling the back of his skull. He stands very, very still in her grip.

"I know-him-" she says, "I can-smell the terror-in him."

Jack gives Scylla an apologetic look. "I'm really not that frightened," he tells her. "Lamentably, I have a skewed sense of priorities."

Scylla sets the manifesto down on a crate nearby and says, "That's not what she means."

The apologetic smile freezes and cracks, and Jack cannot move. "Oh," he manages.

Scylla sets off and flicks her fingers back at them, summoning them along in a brusque military sort of way. "Come on. Let's do this fast."

They move down deeper into the caverns, leaving behind even the dim reassurance of the militia's glowing work lights. Now there is only the lantern in Scylla's hand, barely enough to see the walls by, and the phosphorescence of Charybdis' ancient mad eyes.

The whole place reminds Jack of the entrance to the underworld, those caverns in Turkey where a long time ago people thought the goddess of spring was whisked away into the land of the dead. He knows a lot of weird stuff like that, although it wasn't in any of the books in Bruce's library or even in a magazine delivered to him by accident, as it happens sometimes. He knows things about old dead Greeks and he knows things about medieval kings and he knows things about the temperature at which bone burns, which was a worrying thing to know even before he knew how he knew it. Now it terrifies him.

If they're not here to topple society and set right the wrongs of the last century, Jack really doesn't know what Scylla and Charybdis all _are_ here to do. It's at least sorta religious, and at least a little terroristic. What they want with his boyfriend the billionaire is anyone's guess. Probably not money though. But if not money then—

Scylla halts at the carved opening to the final chamber, a leering weathered face chipped out of the stone above the door. That same ominous smoke twists through the darkness. She pops open the side of the lantern and reaches inside, pulling live fire from the pit of it, tongues of flame licking at her leather glove. She balls up her fist, and like a pitcher winding up at the plate, flings the light deep into the cavern.

"The mandate of heaven," she says, flicking the weak residue of flame from her fingertips. "The correct order of things."

Red erupts inside the darkness, swallowing the very thickness of the air, blinding and unearthly and impossible. For a moment the air glitters and sparks with a light that consumes itself, and then in the lurid glow that remains, ash floats to the cavern floor.

"Empires rise and fall," Scylla says. "Kings have their designated time upon the earth. History demands something of us all."

It isn't so much a vision as it is a dread understanding that rises from the smokeless cavern, like a creeping awareness. There are terrible things out there, in the darkness between the stars, in the abysses of the earth, in the hearts of men. There are abominations that must never see the light of the sun. Whatever can be done to stop this—whatever can be done to hold the line against the dissolution of all things, a figure more terrible than chaos and more infinite than evil—

Jack finds his feet drifting forward, over the stone, as if the fingers of fire licking out towards him have caught him and lifted him, hungry to taste him. It wants him, it _knows_ him.

Scylla's arm thwacks across his chest, startling tears from his eyes. "Cross that threshold," she says, "and you will regret it. A thing like you?" She looks down her nose at him, with her sunken eyes and pitted cheeks. "A thing like you would be burnt to ashes."

xi.

There was a day a month or two before, when Jack woke up to find Bruce's bedroom empty.

It was a strange feeling, to be alone in that vast silken darkness, in that huge bed. He remembers that the stars were just visible through the balcony window, holding their thousands of tiny breaths at the approach of the dawn. In his bare feet, with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, Jack shuffled out into the halls. It seemed like such a long time, wandering, half asleep and half awake. There was a light on in one of the far bedrooms, where the antique furniture was draped in endless white sheets.

The unseen course of the night had pulled a book from a mostly empty shelf, leaving a dark square in the dust. Bruce's head hung over the table, fingers buried in his hairline, and there was such a sadness there. It seeped out of him, soaked the edges of his body.

Photos, Jack remembers. Photos he hadn't seen before, probably that Bruce hadn't either until that night. A circus. A river. Grinning children in a line, a school fieldtrip, and a boy on the shoulders of a man who was clearly Bruce, although he seemed older somehow, despite the fact that it must have been so many years ago—a decade even.

Jack's heart sank. The old Bruce might have been the scrapbooking type, for all he knew, but that handwriting in the messy margins was not Bruce's by a long shot.

He could have gone back to bed. It wasn't any of his business. But you can't just see the man you love looking like that, slumped and silent in his own lightless home, and not want to do _something_.

Jack took his hands. Jack lifted him up from that chair, from that dusty tomb, and brought him up to the balcony, where the first light of morning was breaking over the city far away. He remembers drinking coffee in the dawn, hands clutched tight with Bruce's, and he remembers more than anything how much love can live even in sadness. How much hurt can be softened just by the feeling of a hand in yours.

If he had never known Bruce—if he had never loved Bruce—he would never have learned that.

In Scylla's cavern cell, Jack leans his head back against the stone wall and watches lamplight flicker across the heavy earth. There are so many thoughts that circle him, flashing their eel sharp teeth as he sits alone under the weight of everything he is, but he holds onto this moment. He holds onto it with both hands.

This place feels like the tomb of that dusty bedroom, and more than anything, he wants Bruce to find him and bring him back up into the lavender wash of dawn.

xii.

When the first explosion wracks the cavern, Jack sits up from his slump at the wall. The guard at the door is paltry, because he's unarmed and honestly Scylla probably thinks he couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag, which is untrue but not entirely unfair. Jack comes up to where the two of them are standing and leans against the stone, unnoticed. They're muttering between themselves, guns pulled tight against their chests, wondering if the boss needs help. Not, they take pains to affirm to each other, because they don't want to be down here alone with the ploutonions, but because you remember what happened the last time these costumed assholes got into our stuff, how much tech we lost?

Jack stretches discretely. He's sure not gonna be the weak link in this escape, which is entirely for his own benefit. Jeeze, he's really gonna have to make this up to Bruce. He's gonna have to…

His stomach rolls with dread. How can he ever make up for all the trouble he's dragged Bruce through, not even considering today? Where would he even start? How can he ever—? Everything he is, has been, how could he ever be worth

Jack drags his hand over his face, trying to put a pin in that downward spiral before it gets too deep. This is not the time to travel that well worn road. There _will_ be time later to tear himself apart, if he can just keep it together for a little longer.

Pebbles rattle against the floor. He sees the boot before he sees the rest of the Robin, crashing heel first through the air, and then Jack is twisting aside to let the guard fly past him. There's a heavy thump as man and armament hit the floor behind him. The second guard goes for his gun, but the barrel is too long and his reflexes are too slow: he goes flying right after his comrade into the makeshift cell.

The Robin, unmistakably Damien, pats dust from his gloves. "You're a lot of trouble," he says, pinning Jack with a narrow look.

 _How could he ever how could he_

Jack winces. "I try not to be," he says, absolutely despairing of his whole existence.

Damien turns abruptly, with a little _tchh_ noise. "It's fine," he says. "Apparently, you're worth it."

 _Have you talked to Bruce about me_ , Jack wants to ask, but he knows it's not the right time, and even if he wanted to, Damien is already several paces ahead of him.

Above them, in the higher chamber, the byword is chaos. It's not as clean as it was last time, with the lights cut and the ceiling collapsed. The room is full of smoke from some kind of flashbang, and between the reduced visibility and the close quarters Jack can see why very few of Scylla's people are using firearms. It's hard to tell which way the tide is rolling. Some of the Robins are indisputably better at hand to hand combat than the militia, but some of them... some of them less so.

"Where's Bruce?" Jack shouts, absolutely certain that Bruce will be here, regardless of how he managed it.

Damien's pace flags for a moment, just as he raises his grappling gun towards the pandemonium ahead. "See for yourself," he says, with a satisfaction that Jack doesn't understand and finds a little frightening.

After Damien has shot off into the fray, he edges into the chamber, trying to stay low. It would be deeply unfortunate to get hit with a stray bullet at this stage in the game. Bruce, he thinks, Bruce must be somewhere nearby. Maybe up at the mouth of the cavern? Maybe providing logistical support, he wouldn't be able to resist getting involved somehow, he's never been one to stand by when work needed doing—

Scylla stumbles out of the smoke, a tranq gun heavy in her fist. She laughs, ragged and wild, and the curve of her black visor is cracked like a spiderweb. "Yes!" she shouts, "Finally! _Finally!_ Was that all it took?"

"Drop the gun," says a low voice, almost a rumble, from beyond the fog. It sends a shiver up Jack's spine, a thrill as delicious and pure as the first time Bruce pulled him down into his lap, in the back of the limo, in the secret dark. The feeling is hot and automatic, almost animal. Jack takes a step forward before he knows what he's doing. He knows that voice, he knows it...

There is a pop of gunpowder somewhere further away, and in its wake the dust and smoke whip away from them all, like the edge of the cloak which whips out from around the figure before them, a figure Jack knows, a figure that he could never mistake. Jack clutches a hand over his mouth, afraid of his own ragged breathing.

"Is that all it took!" Scylla screams, hysterical with glee now, "is that all I had to do!? You weak-hearted bastard, was that _all I had to do?"_

Batman advances through the smoke, all his grey and black edges almost lost in the darkness. "Drop the gun _now_ ," he says. "Surrender and minimize your losses, Scylla. You can still lose so much more."

Every nerve in Jack's body _screams_. The overpass, the streetlamp, that night on the park bench—that voice that voice that _voice_ —inside Jack's ribcage there is light that burns him and consumes him and it flares to howling life at the sound of that _voice_.

"Bruce," he rasps.

Bruce's head snaps towards him, everything but the slight startled parting of his lips obscured by plastic and Teflon and opaque glass. It only lasts a moment. The beginning of a breath. But it's long enough for Scylla to raise her gun and fire off a shot that cracks through the weak joint at the neck of the armored suit. He falls back a step, gauntlet lifting to the site of the breach, fingers not quite touching the glittering end of the dart.

No. That's not…

Scylla heaves her gun aside, and it cracks horribly against the ground. "No!" she shouts, "No, this isn't right! You didn't do it _right!_ You can't just put on the suit and expect to be the bat! You're still just a rich little boy playing dress up!"

Bruce staggers. Scylla turns and in a single ruthless movement she hooks her elbow around Jack's neck. His breath seizes in his throat.

"You coward!" she says, "You won't die for him, then? You're not willing to die?"

She drags him back into the downward sloping hall, moving too fast for his heels to keep up—she's dragging him bodily by the throat, his whole weight pinned in the crook of her arm as he fumbles at her grip. Pressure throbs in his sinuses. His tongue flattens up into the back of his mouth and he can't breathe, he can't breathe at all like this, how is she so _strong?_

In his swimming vision he can see the shape that comes after them, the flare of wings, and he wants to reach out for it but it's all he can do to keep Scylla from choking him to death in the course of their relentless descent. He hits the stone without ceremony, flung gasping onto his stomach, and as he looks blearily up into the darkness he sees the shape of that grinning ancient face carved above them. The air around them is acrid with the overflow of whatever poison gas lies beyond the chamber door.

Scylla fumbles with the lantern hooked to her belt, and then the cave erupts into fire red as blood, red as _emergency_ in the dark. She grabs Jack by the collar and drags him up to his knees, pointing into the cannibal glow.

"Coward!" she shouts. "Here is your last chance to redeem yourself! There is no place in this world for Bruce Wayne, you coward! Every day that you live is another day that this world goes unprotected from the darkness! The bat cannot live while you still wear his body like a bad suit!"

Jack looks up into the darkness. That is the shape of the man he loves, he would know it with or without the ears, any time, any place. This has all gone so terribly wrong, and the worst part is that part of him—part of him _sings_ with it, with understanding. So this was the monstrous thing that Bruce was holding back from him, the dark shape beyond the curtain, the nightmare that answers Jack's endless blue-green nightmares. It's beautiful. He almost wants to weep with how beautiful it is, all its gargoyle shapes and brutal promises.

Everything else is blown clean and pure from his mind at this final gut punch of understanding.

Scylla shakes Jack, like a kitten, as the fire rages behind them. "You can't have it both ways!" she shouts.

"Let him go Scylla," Bruce says, only a hit of a sway betraying his steady approach.

"Always," Scylla says, voice ragged with screaming, "always _always_ Bruce must die so that bat can live. If you won't do it for yourself, then I will do it for you."

Bruce is nearly on them now, a flash of something pale showing through the breach in his suit. He squares his shoulders, despite the crack in his armor, ready to make his stand. "If you hurt him," he starts.

Scylla lifts Jack to his feet like he weighs nothing, and she holds him just at the edge of the chamber entrance, where the tongues of fire lick at his heels like hungry cats. "I _will_ hurt him," she says. "I will obliterate him. I will cast him into the fire and he will join the thousands of dead sparrows before him, unless you take his place!"

Bruce halts. His jaw is working, under the sharp edges of the mask, and it's a look that Jack knows from various banal moments in the long domestic dream that comprises their life together all these months. A kitchen. A garden. "If," he says. "If I—if I die. You'll let him live?"

"Oh Brucie," Jack whispers, "sweetie, no. No no no. You can't do that."

"It's not so bad to die," Scylla says, more gently now. "You've done it before."

"That's what you want from me," Bruce says, a hint of a question in his voice. "Just to die?"

"Not _just_ ," Scylla says, "to die. To be reborn. Beyond this door is the fire of truth, the mandate of heaven. What you are meant to be, what history requires of you, it will restore. You cannot live this half life any longer, shirking the call of duty, feigning ignorance. This is what history requires of you."

"How can you claim to know," Bruce says, "what history requires of _me?"_

"Anyone with eyes can see a pattern," Scylla says. "And I have eyes beyond eyes, as many eyes as there are stars in the sky..."

A flash of green catches Jack's attention. At the mouth of the hall, above them, twin phosphorescent pinpoints fall on their frozen drama. His heart hammers in his chest. Once Charybdis arrives, there won't be any chance for Bruce. She's too big, and he's too inexperienced, and Scylla already has her bargaining chip—him—well in hand. They're all at the end of their grand act, now, one way or another.

Bruce is wavering. He shouldn't be wavering, not for Jack's sake, but he _is._ Jack can see it clearly, in the fall of his hand, in the movement of his jaw. His beautiful darling Bruce, always trying to put himself between Jack and the bullets of the world, always throwing himself on the world's unsheathed knives.

There's no way Bruce can know what Jack is. He's sure of it now. But Jack—for the first time Jack knows what he is, and more than that he knows what _Bruce_ is. Bruce is goodness. Bruce is the only respite left in this world, the only kind face, the only soft touch. He deserves his peace, in a way that Jack has never deserved even the drops of it that spill over Bruce's cup and into his.

Here is the truth, which Jack has known since that night on the lawn with Alfred's quiet condemnation ringing in his ears, since that night on the park bench, since that night at the overpass: he would kill to protect this Bruce, this Bruce who is warm and hopeful and _his_ , of all the things on this earth the only thing that is _his._

He's always known this moment was coming. Now that it arrives, it is a relief. Cleaner than a gun to the chin, than a suicide in a pond somewhere. Never in a thousand years will he be able to pay back the trouble that he's been, or the love that he's drunk down with endless thirst, or the unremembered evil that shadows his back, but he _can_ do this. He's ready.

Bruce steps forward, chin up, breath deep—

Jack relaxes in Scylla's grip, and he smiles at Bruce, and he lets himself fall back into the light.

and

 _It burns, it burns like_

the burn of cherry cola breaking across your tongue, the burn of acid raging over your skin, I've loved you loved you loved you in a thousand fractal infinities and I—

if he could scream he would scream or maybe he already is

—love you here, in the nothing beyond the place that burns and burns where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth—

Jack heaves a breath that scours his insides, distantly aware that he is on his knees before the raging fire, gloved fingers clutching his face. In the flame, towering green before him, he sees a reflection of himself. It is him but it isn't him, in its cheap black suit and its soaking hair, but when he tries to make out any more the vision goes soft and wavers in the depths.

It dawns on him belatedly that he is alive.

He rises to his feet, unsteady, and looks up at the edges of this cell. He can't make out much beyond the thickness of heat and light. He turns, and as he turns he catches sight of that impossible reflection again.

It grins at him.

"Is _this_ the man," it calls, with carnival barker delight, "who shook the earth and made kingdoms tremble? The man who made the world a wilderness, who overthrew its cities and would not let his captives go?"

Jack steps back. The reflection mirrors him. And then its foot lands on the stone beyond the ring of fire. It comes through brushing flame from its suit jacket, just as white as Jack's stifling winter coat. Its face is and isn't his, pulled strangely and grinning and recognizable, painted like a dream of hell. It reaches out and, as Jack trembles, straightens Jack's lapels with both hands.

"How far you have fallen," it says, "morning star, son of the dawn!"

Now that the moment has arrived, the nightmare to end all living nightmares, it is nothing like Jack imagined it would be. The sea is gone, the night is gone, and all that remains is light, light, _light_

It pats him on the cheek. "Now _that_ ," it says, "is funny."

Jack slaps the hand away, life flooding back into his limbs all at once. "You," he says. Yesterday's worries on the roof flood through his mind in fast forward, god, was it only yesterday? His heel scuffs the floor as he takes another step back.

The Joker, grinning and unmistakable, advances. "Well it ain't Santy Claus, that's for sure." He pauses, hip cocked, and presses a finger to his cheek. "You know, you're a bit slow on up uptake, boyo."

Those really are his eyes.

Bruce and him, but now it does make sense, it makes sense in the worst way. It's purer, cleaner than the vision of dark rooms and blackmail, and it is infinitely worse. All at once, the day is catching up with him.

"But I love—" Jack says, "loved—"

"Well of course you did," the Joker says, twirling his palm as he shrugs. "Everything you've done, you've done—for—love."

A memory swims up into his mind, the last memory, of Bruce's gloved hand reaching to him desperately through the green. This isn't like those things at all, the harlequin madness and the technicolor sadism of the newsreels. That was torture and this is… protection…

A hand reaching down through the green. Is it the _last_ memory, or…? He isn't sure anymore.

He dares to look back, for a second, and all at once the Joker is right in front of him, leaning forward, like a visitor inspecting art in a museum. He jumps. The Joker lifts a brow and straightens up.

"Yeesh," he says, "what a basket case you are! Just as well that your turn's up. I'm gonna be washing the smell of anxiety out of our hair for _weeks_."

Jack freezes. _"My_ turn," he says. "My _turn?_ This is my life, Mister, not yours. Not—not anymore, anyway..."

That started out strong enough, but he's wavering, under the weight of everything this _means_ , and the Joker sees it. His red-rimmed eyes glitter.

"What do you _really_ think you're protecting here?" the Joker says, hands clasped behind his back. "You were doomed from the moment Batsy-boo put on the suit. Oh, he's not finished baking yet, but the day is coming isn't it? You can feel it. Ripples in the water. Our boy never can resist meddling. One of these days the toys and the kids won't be enough, if not tonight then some night soon, and then... he'll go down into the darkness... and peel off his pretty little person suit once and for all."

"He doesn't," Jack says, _"have_ to. He doesn't have to be that person."

Joker thumps himself on the forehead, gloved palm to translucent skin. "Wake up and smell the bacon," he says, "he's always _been_ that person. Give or take a little trauma, here and there. You can't fight this pattern, kiddo. As long as you exist, he exists. As long as he exists, you exist. You thought throwing yourself on some kind of cosmic knife was going to _end_ that?"

"If I—If I die here—"

 _"Die?"_ the Joker crows. _"Die?_ You can't die, they'd never stand for it. Anyway, you're not looking at the bigger picture."

The Joker loops his arm around Jack's shoulder and pulls him in tight. He spins them around to the towering wall of fire, green like the chemical depths of the sea, green like acid. Nothing on earth burns green, Jack thinks dimly, not the sky or the moon or the fires we build. Nothing is supposed to give off a light like that. He is stiff as a board in the Joker's grip.

The Joker waves a hand at the leaping expanse, and shapes begin to grow in the depths of the fire, their edges flickering wickedly.

"Once upon a time there was a man," the Joker says, "or a boy, perhaps. And was he ever unlucky! He had everything, a family, a life, an identity, and then—poof!—in the course of one bad day, he was nothing. A nobody."

The shape in the fire is Bruce, but not the armored Bruce of minutes before. It's just Bruce, hunched over in the study, his head in his clutching fist. That was how he looked the night after he got the call about the warehouse shooting, how he looked with the photo album spread out across the table in front of him. Jack tastes ashes.

"It's amazing how quickly you can lose everything," the Joker says. "So impermanent, this life! What does any of it matter, when tomorrow it will all be gone? What does it matter that you were happy, or in love? Who cares! It never last! It's all a cruel joke; they only give you enough that it will _kill_ you when you lose it all again."

The shapes of darkness in the light flicker and shift—little round beads all scattered like teeth, the shape of wings against a window, a spotlight against the sky.

"You know what I mean," the Joker says. "Your boy out there has never felt that kind of pain, he doesn't know yet! He's so young! So fresh and whole! He's never lost anything that mattered. But he'll know soon, oh yes, he'll know what it feels like to scream for relief that never comes."

"It all ends the same way," the Joker goes on. "Whether you walk into these jaws or he does."

Jack stares at the kaleidoscope of tragedy before him, mouth open, terror sinking its teeth into his heart. The Joker leans in, tucking back a lock of hair that Jack shook loose in his tumble.

"You know what the funniest part is?" he asks, a whisper in Jack's ear. " _You_ made him love you."

Jack rips out of his grip, staggering back across the floor. "No," he says, "no, I'm not—I'm not important enough—"

"Of course you are!" the Joker says, delighted. "You're the clown prince of crime! The harlequin of hate! You have laid low the nations, sweetheart, there's no going back from that. What, you _want_ to be an assistant butcher to some pigfaced blowhard, living in a tenement in the narrows, dead from a self inflicted gunshot wound before the age of forty?"

How can he answer that question? Of course he doesn't want that, of course not. But that's not—that's not what this is _about._

The Joker holds out his empty palms, a sign of surrender that Jack knows better than to trust. He comes forward, slowly, until he is within arms' length of Jack. "You _are_ somebody, sweetheart," he says. "You're the last face that men see before the bottom of a grave. You're the sound of five shots spinning in the barrel of a revolver. You are the _light,_ sweetheart, you are the sun that scorches the planet, the smell of rot, the buzz of flies."

His hand comes up, rests lightly against Jack's heart.

"You are the necessary end," he says. "The punchline and the set up. Without the light, you can't have darkness."

The Joker's hand lifts, cups the curve of Jack's jaw. He is sweet-faced now, sympathetic, clicking his tongue in a motherly way.

"He needs you," the Joker says. "He needs you now more than ever. You have to show him, you see? You have to show him the light. Show him what it means to suffer, to live, to be loved. If you die here, he'll be alone. You have to show him what pain _means_."

"I don't want to," Jack says, feeling wretched. "I want to sit on the balcony and, and, drink coffee with him, I want to hold him with my own hands! In my own arms! I want to be _loved."_

"You think he's gonna love you when he knows what you are?"

It's a terrible thought. No, how could he? How could anyone as good as Bruce love someone like—someone who—

"And what are you gonna do when he dies? You know the life expectancy in Gotham, and that's not even taking into account how many people are already looking down the scope of a rifle at the bouncing baby billionaire. There's gonna be more nights like tonight. You can't protect something by cuddling it and feeding it scraps and crying when it takes a bullet to its pretty little head."

The inferno around them roars, licking over its edges.

"He has to be stronger. He's gotta be strong enough to do what it takes."

Jack feels the tears in his eyes but he can't bring himself to wipe them away. Doesn't he have a choice? Doesn't he have a choice at all?

The Joker, or the thing that looks like him, gently pulls Jack down and presses a kiss to his forehead, and in the searing chemical agony of those painted lips there is

A yellow flower growing from bare skull in the wilderness,

Saltwater taffy dripping over a drowned boardwalk,

A whisper under an umbrella at the edge of a muddy grave that says, "he was only a week from retirement—"

Jack looks into the light and he knows that he has no choice, that his time is coming, and that all of this is crashing to an end—the long domestic dream of these last few months, the fear and the nightmares, the drudgery, but also the sweetness... He has never had a choice, that's the whole _point_.

Just wanting things to be different has never stopped the bad things from happening. Nothing ever stops them, not for long. He has never had the power to change anything.

Joker pulls back. "You and I both know," Joker says, "that madness is like gravity! All you need is a little—"

The fire twists and leaps around them, the floor rushes up to meet him, he is falling, he is tumbling into an abyss as green as the chemical sea

"—Push!"

xiv.

In his white coat, sootless and shining, the Joker leans against the chamber door and laughs. His shadow is cast out in front of him in green fire, long and flickering. In the room beyond, countless tangled bodies freeze mid-blow. The woman in the shattered helmet looks up from the floor, the skin over her teeth and gums torn open at last from jaw to lip.

The Joker laughs and laughs and laughs, barely able to hold himself up with how hard he's wheezing.

"No," the batman says. It's a soft sound. The sound of true horror is always such a soft sound. So he didn't know after all! Jeeze louise, what a farce.

Joker lifts his head. He wipes a tear from his eye, trying to catch his breath. "Darling," he manages.

All those pretty shiny little robins are drawing back. Even the military types are retreating, although slower. The pipsqueak with the fancy gear is the only one who stands his ground. "You," he says. But thoughtful, not like his old knight.

"Me," Joker says, showing all his many teeth. "Well this is a hell of a welcome back for your old pal Joker, huh? Nobody thought to bring a cake, I see."

Someone clicks open a pair of handcuffs.

"Ah ah ah," Joker says, lifting a finger. "None of that now. Why, I haven't even committed a crime yet! We really will have to rectify that..."

From Scylla's collapsed form, Joker leans down and takes back his gun. What a quaint thing it is! But you can't beat the classics. Speaking of which.

In one smooth motion, Joker cocks the gun and points it at the twerp who was too dumb to retreat like the rest of his buddies. He knows this one. This is one the _real_ wonder boys, batsy's darling protégés. Joker doesn't need to look at the batman to know what expression his face will take, or even to hear the sharp hiss of breath, although he does hear that, and he appreciates it.

"Jack," the batman says, one syllable shot through with quiet desperation. "Jack, what are you doing?"

"Darling, please, try to keep up," Joker says. "I'm point a gun at your kid."

"But _—why?"_

"What a silly question," Joker says. He keeps the sights pinned on robin, following each twitch of his little body. "I'm about to blow this popsicle stand, and I'd like it to be sans those pretty bracelets the brat is holding. It's nothing personal, this is a hell of a party, but I've been out of the game for _quite_ a while and I'm eager to get back to work."

He feels a little bit like a frog coming up from a deep hibernation, taking in its first air after the winter. All the old aches are remembering themselves, one by one, and Joker takes a deep sweet breath of the pain that he was born into, now and once before. Everything hurts, and everything sings, and the world is a riot of spinning neon that screams for his attention.

"Jack," the bat says again, moving towards him.

The new impulse comes through him in a flash of white noise, almost religious in its ecstasy. Shoot the kid. Blow his little brains out and walk the spray pattern like a red carpet up to the light, out of this cave, into his kingdom. Won't the big old bat cry _then_ , won't he ever.

His fingers twitch. But the trigger holds steady.

"Jack," the bat says, softly, "you don't have to do this. Come with me. I'll get you out of here."

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Joker says. "Off to Arkham, just like old times, dust off the old cell."

"You haven't done anything yet," the batman says. "Don't cross that line, please, Jack. Put the gun down."

The Joker starts laughing again, and the sights of his gun wobble. Robin twitches, like he's about to make a run for it, and without a word Jack fires off a warning shot into the stone behind him, _crack bang_ , the explosion rattling the walls of the cavern. Everyone flinches.

"I haven't," he echoes, in the deafening silence, "I haven't—!"

Something is twisting his chest, deep in the cage that holds his withered heart, but he doesn't know what it is. This is funny! This is really funny! Batsy doesn't think he's _done_ anything yet. As if Joker isn't the one painted in so much blood that the Nile itself runs red around him. As if the nervous wisp of a nobody who haunted his bed for six months had ever been anything but a ghost of the true monster!

"We should have quit while we were ahead!" Joker says, the tears in his eyes only half mirth now.

The bat is coming towards him, and before he knows what he's done, the barrel of the gun is pointed at that armored chest. The flutter of cape, a shape that has haunted his dreams since he was born sobbing with laughter into the arms of this miserable world. The bat makes a sharp warning gesture at his robin. All these months, and Jack never dreamed of bats. He wonders why that was.

The bat keeps his slow advance, palms out, and why is that so familiar? "Jack," he says. "I want to help you."

Joker bares his teeth, pulling back into himself. "You don't even know what I am yet."

"I know who you are." The crack down his chest is starting to shed bits of matte plastic. "You're the man I love."

"You loved a paper doll!" Joker snarls. His grip shakes. "Jack is dead! Jack was never alive!"

"That's not true. You're still him, I can see it in the way your hand is shaking."

Joker closes his other hand over the shaking one. It helps a little. So he can remember all of it, so what? What good does it do him to have the memories of some wet little nancy knocking around in the old noodle if that person _never really existed?_

"I didn't ask for this!" Joker yells, "I didn't ask to be your boyfriend or your charity project or your devoted _pet_ , Bats! I didn't ask for this god damn half life, or your god damn _mercy._ "

The barrel of the gun thumps into the bat's chest, where it trembles and squeaks across the Kevlar. The day they went ice skating, early into that delicate friendship, and Jack didn't know how to do it—his hand against Bruce's chest, the hard panes of muscle, as they drifted across the ice—it was spring, not yet green but smelling of wind from the south, from the ocean—

"What does it matter? What does any of it _matter?"_ Joker shouts, burying the barrel in Kevlar. "It doesn't last! It can't ever last! What does it matter if we were _happy!"_

The heavy weight of gauntlets close gently around the back of his head and pull him in close. Joker's arms fall, numb, at his sides.

"Maybe it matters," says the quiet voice in his ear, "because we _were_ happy."

A dim awareness of the rest of the world is coming back to him, of the many bodies watching this exchange, all their shadow puppet shapes suspended in the darkness. They don't matter to the Joker. They've never mattered, except in the way that the faceless shadow of the audience beyond the stage lights matter. Now, not even that.

"I should have killed the brat," he whispers. "Then you wouldn't be holding me like this."

The hold around him tenses. "I wouldn't. But you didn't, and you could have. I know the difference."

"I could still do it."

This embrace is swallowing him whole, eating him alive. He's not Jack, but Jack isn't gone like he should be either. Whoever he _is_ , he can't forget the taste of coffee on the balcony under a pale sunrise, not any more than he can forget the taste of gunpowder and blood licked from the mouth of this terrified city.

He could still do it. It's all on him now—if he crosses that line, then the batman will fear him and love him and hate him the way he's supposed to, and the dance will resume. A thousand glittering nights under the moonlight, rooftop chases, their topsy-turvy chivalrous tragedy. That was all he ever asked for, all he was ever meant for, and god _damn_ the waters that gave him something else instead.

"Will you?" the Bat says.

Does he have a choice? Is there still a moment left in which he can choose and not be chosen for? Wanting things to be different never stopped the bad things from happening. But he _is_ the bad thing, this time. Does he- Can he-

If he can choose one thing—even if only for a moment, even if only in the span of this moment, the infinite ocean of this moment that holds them and all that they have been—to be a thing that does not burn, that does not hurt?

The stock of the gun creaks in his grip, and then all at once it hits the ground with a _thunk._ That old bastard Jack, he got the last laugh, didn't he?

He lifts his shaking hands. Bruce's back feels broad and familiar, more familiar than he ever could have dreamed. Beneath the surface of the water, the depths are clear and green.

Through the weight of it, if you just float up, you can almost see the sky.


	5. I am undone

i.

Day star, son of the dawn-

The world is so loud, unbearably loud when he returns to it

ii.

A road above Gotham. Midnight.

The car hums new and hot with power, taking turns on these mountain roads faster than its fuddy duddy owner ever would have done it, whoever that guy might have been. The man who was once the Joker slams the brakes as he comes around a stony corner and up onto a clearing in the pine forest. The trees have all been torn out here. The grass in the headlights too green for the time of year, rolling down to the sheer edge without stop, and beyond that, the silver speckled sky.

The car skids and spins, scraping black tire tracks into the pavement and then deep into the immaculate lawn. The black earth splits underneath it.

Someone who could not easily have been mistaken for Jack, of the uninteresting nickname and the nervous ticking fingers, steps out of the glittering red car. He had seen its owner fumbling with their keys, and on a cruel whim, cracked the man's face into a No Parking sign and taken the liberty of a free ride for his efforts. The city was too tight around him, like a skin that hadn't finished shedding, and he'd thought—let's take a ride, get some perspective.

In the back of his head, there's that meddling super fool saying, "Don't lose sight of the bodies in the rubble."

After everything, the fire and smoke and fear, he'd arrived in the narrows as evening was falling, alone on the doorstep of the apartment Jack had rented. In all of its dingy corners and glowing venetian blinds, he almost hoped to find—to find some of the nightmare that Jack had lived in, some monster that he could understand at last. But there was nothing left in it but mundane wretchedness. Nicotine caked into the wallpaper, cracks in the plaster. No monsters under the bed. No eyes in the blinking blue neon. No worse or better than any of the thousand safe houses and hidey holes visited in the long career of a Gotham criminal.

He stood for a long time in the doorway, waiting for the terror to find him, and when at last it did not, he took his hat from the coat rack and left.

The hills above Gotham have a view all the way to the bay, if you can catch them on a clear day. There's a cabin on a lake up here that the Waynes own, and it occurs to him now that he's driving the same road up to it that they took last August. The house is so clear in his memory, clearer than any of the jackinthebox funfairs where he spent raucous blood-soaked nights in his previous life. The mist rising off the lake in the cool blue twilight. Will its long windows with their open glass unnerve him the way they did before, or will they be just another lost moment, like the dismal apartment, another meaningless remembered sensation?

This lawn where he's thrown his stolen car into park is going to be the site for a mountain house, as the real estate agency's _Sold_ sign says. It's loose in the grass, where the soil isn't deep enough to keep it upright, and he pushes it over with one finger as he passes. It makes a rattling noise as it bounces off the turf behind him.

He takes a seat on a surge of stone that breaks through the grass like a tooth from gums, just at the edge of the steep plummet. Over the shoulders of the hills below, he can just make out the foggy glittering ruin of Gotham, like glass broken across the ground. Here and there, the slow red blinking of relay towers.

What a thing perspective can do for a man, eh?

He sits there for a long time, doing nothing. The riot of sensation that came with this new/old body is finally settling down into something he can set aside, the years of familiarity calming it into a manageable clamor at the back of his head. Hell's bells, what a pain it is to be born. All that light and noise and headache. Now it's quiet. Now it's just John Doe, the unknown specter, high above the city.

It's beautiful. It would be even more beautiful if it were on fire, but he's so tired. Too tired for anything that grand and spectacular.

He remembers that final stand, the last night in this body. There was so much smoke, so much gorgeous madness, the parade floats and the screaming children, but god it feels like it was a thousand years ago now. All of it seems so far away, all the meticulous effort he put into that spectacle and all the hundreds of schemes before it, fracturing and fragmenting the further back he tries to go. Less than a year, and everything he was then has become as distant and hollow as the projection of film on a silver screen. There was something so unrelentingly real about Jack's life, like terracotta and tweed under fingers, textured to the point of pain.

He hears the sound of knuckles rapping curiously on glass. He doesn't turn.

"And all this time I thought you couldn't drive," Bruce remarks, ruefully.

"You're not supposed to be the world's greatest detective right now," John Doe says, "you shouldn't be able to find me."

He can almost feel Bruce coming closer, like a magnetic pull down his spine, like a six sense that only cares for one thing: a single north point on his inscrutable compass.

"You always say that the mountain house is the most peaceful place you've ever been," Bruce says. "I thought maybe you were looking for… some of that."

Bruce perches on the stone beside him, barely taking up a fraction of the space that John Doe has laid claim to. His arms are crossed, his old jeans hugging his thighs. That night on the park bench he looked a little like this, all rugged and tired, Walt Whitman tragic. Why is he still so god damned attractive?

"How long were you gonna wait to tell me about the Bat?" John Doe asks, as his lip curls back. He wants to cut, because cutting is what he _does_.

"I don't know," Bruce admits. "I hadn't gotten that far. I wasn't even sure—I wasn't committed, until I heard you were gone, and then I had the cowl on before I even knew I had pulled it out."

"Liar," John Doe says. "You started shaving a month ago. You knew what you were gonna do."

Bruce lets out a sad little laugh. "I guess I wasn't thinking about it like that at the time," he says. "I thought I…"

"You thought you could show up once and flash your utility belt and go home, and everything would magically get better?"

He can _hear_ the way Bruce is frowning, forehead creasing. "No, I just thought… people were getting hurt, and I had the tools, and if there was something I could do then I could at least do _that."_

"What a life!" John Doe says, "Your little wife homemaking in a nervous tizzy as you heroically swoop through the city. One day they bring your body home riddled like swiss cheese and some street cop has to explain how you were found in a gutter dressed up like a rat."

"It wasn't _like_ that," Bruce says, turning on his perch. His heel hits the grass. "You've got so much on your plate just managing your own mental health, I didn't want to—I couldn't put my own problems on you too. I could handle it on my own. It was my mess, not yours."

"But it wasn't your mess!"

Bruce digs the heel of his palm into his forehead. "It _was_ my mess," he says. "It still is. There's a hole in this city shaped like me, and I can't ignore it for much longer. I've tried, god Jack, I've _tried_. I wanted to have a life with you, a real life, like real people."

"I'm not Jack. Whoever that was, it wasn't me _."_

"I don't believe that."

For the first time, John Doe turns. He pulls a leg up under himself and leans forward, pushing too far into Bruce's space, flashing his teeth in the dark. "You don't _want_ to believe that," he snarls. "I have carved the skin from my own face for you, Bruce Wayne, I have burned your children to ashes and I have poisoned an entire city for you. Jack could never have done that. Jack was _weak_ and _scared_ and now he's _dead!"_

Everything is crashing together in a churning mess, the time before and the time after, one lifetime trying to drown another. Dyonesium and fire, smoke, immortality only a handbreadth away. He's breathing hard. "I was your friend, and you threw me away! I never wanted to be your lover! I only ever wanted you to love me, to fear me, the way I loved and feared you—from your endless series of melodramatic rooftops, stronger and better—"

John Doe pants, and realizes that he's taken Bruce by the collar, clutching desperately at his leather jacket. Bruce holds his ground, proud chin, chest slowly rising and falling.

He's lost the thread of this conversation. All he can see is iris, pale blue and glowing in the headlights.

"I've listened to the last transmission that night," Bruce says, evenly, "and I promise you, whatever else happened between us—there at the end, even the person I was before, he knew. He understood what you were trying to do. I didn't—I didn't understand until now, knowing you… knowing who you are…"

John Doe sags. All that heartbreak, volatile as napalm; the lashing out, the bared teeth… all he'd ever asked for was a little appreciation. A little reciprocation. He hadn't asked for the long domestic dream, for _tenderness_ , but that was what the water gave him anyhow.

"You think you know now, do you," John Doe says. "What's it matter to you! You don't remember any of it."

"Not the way you do," Bruce concedes.

He wants to say that he misses that Batman, the creature he served and worshipped and sacrificed to, dark and dour and forever out of reach. But that's the creature that Jack died to put off for one more day, and he is Jack, and he is lost in the wreckage of two minds splintering as they crash across each other.

"Underneath Wayne Manor," Bruce says, slowly, "there's a machine. A machine that could bring back that Batman. It has everything backed up from my mind the night before the cave-in, the person I was at that exact—" he opens his hand, "—snapshot of time. Before whatever it was that we said in the cave. Maybe before I understood…"

He looks down at the hands loose around his collar, forgotten.

"I'd have to die," he says. "To use it. I tried before, but it won't take as long as I have a living mind, with my own thoughts and memories. I have to achieve brain-death before it can overwrite me. That's what Scylla was talking about. I have to die for that man to live. Sometimes I feel like she was right, like maybe that is how it has to be. Didn't a part of him die that night in the alleyway? Am I that part?"

John Doe searches in the face of this man for something to ground himself on, something to make the rage of mismatched memories quiet their screaming. The mythic and the mundane are at war inside him, incompatible and howling.

"I used to think, when you change that much," Bruce says, "doesn't the person you used to be die, in a way?"

John Doe gives him a mirthless smile. "Used to?"

Bruce smiles his heartbreaking crooked smile, his sleepless night dragging at all his angles. "I know better now."

John Doe lets go of the collar abruptly, hands hovering in the air between them.

The broken glass pinpoints of the city below them glitter. That neon purgatory of the soul, their shared home. He had always belonged, that's the bad joke of it.

"Do you still," Bruce starts. "Even though I'm not him, do you still—"

"Heh." John Doe sits back on his palms, watching the sky. "I'm still yours. I've always been yours, Brucie boy. Since the first time I saw your shadow in the chemical factory, I was gone."

"Really?" Bruce says, and his voice is so fragile, so uncertain, that the part of the man which had been the Joker wants to take him now and gently break him open, to crack him apart and make him _cry_.

But the man who would cry for the Joker, who is brave or stupid enough to be fragile in front of the creature who more than once tried to murder him, that is the man who held him as he came apart at the seams in a dingy tenement in the narrows, who brought him croissants at work, who defended him to Alfred without a second thought. It's all one and the same, the weakness and the strength, and for the first time John Doe has the understanding it takes to wonder if the Joker had it wrong the whole blasted time—maybe it was the human part, the _soft_ part, that made the Batman what it was…

If he succeeded in cutting the love out of that, what would have been left?

"Whoever you are," John Doe says, instead, "it's only ever been you."

Bruce reaches out, his movements unsure and achingly vulnerable, and then he pulls John Doe against him, tucking him in tight against his broad chest. John Doe shivers. It's cold up here, in the wind and the coming winter. He's only just noticing it.

"What now?" Bruce says.

John Doe chokes out a laugh, burying himself in Bruce's shirt. Isn't it funny how Jack thought he was no one? He _is_ no one, now, not jack and not joker, a nothing caught between two lives. An unidentifiable body on the slab.

What are his options really. He's always hated the god damn butcher's shop. He won't be caught dead crawling back to that life. But what's left? The moment he crosses that line, crowns himself in that final bloody laurel wreath, all the warmth of his life with Bruce will die forever. Maybe Bruce will still love him, the way that the batman before him did, but there can't ever be a _life_ like that. There can only be the long breathless rollercoaster down to their eventual murder-suicide, gorgeous and exciting and cold cold cold.

"With this face," he says, gesturing towards the face in question, "I've got limited choices."

"You can always come home with me," Bruce says, tightening his hand around John Doe's shoulder. "Say the word. I'll take you home."

"Home! What a word."

"I mean it."

John Doe runs his gloved finger down the zipper of Bruce's jacket, unable to feel the sensation. "Suppose I kill you in your sleep? Hmm? I could flip at any minute now."

"You won't," Bruce says, easy and certain.

"…No," John Doe says. "I won't. But I could do so much worse, darling, so much worse than you can even imagine as you are."

"I believe in you," Bruce says.

The finger pauses, in the middle of its trajectory down the zipper. It shakes. How can it be that simple for him? It's naïve, that's what it is, and John Doe cannot tell if he wants to preserve that innocence or shatter it irreparably. What a heavy burden it is to be trusted. What a heavy fucking burden.

"You can't be batman like that," he says, shaking his head. His cheek brushes metal. "They'll eat you alive."

"I can," Bruce says. "I will."

"You can," John Doe mocks, "you will. You sound like you've already made up your mind."

"I guess I have."

"You can always die after all. That's still an option."

Bruce lifts his hand to John Doe's cheek, curving his fingers over the hard angles. His skin is so cold. "You didn't die," he says. "You're still here. A little different, but still here."

It's pointless trying to argue this semantic, even if it was certain, which it isn't. Not that he hasn't spent his whole life up until now trying to argue a pointless semantic with Bruce, and racking up a body count to shame entire regimes. That's something else that has changed in him. He doesn't want to nail himself to this nihilistic cross anymore. He just wants _rest._

Bruce's thumb runs over his cheekbone. "Why can't we be both?" he says. "What does _Scylla_ know about any of it? Who says anyone has to die?"

Someone always has to die. That's life. Everyone dies sooner or later. Still, the sentiment rings true. Even the joker in him, he knows that there's no such thing as dying for a cause—there is only dying, and then being dead. Why should either of them burn their ships for a war that can have no winners.

John Doe lifts his hand and covers Bruce's. He thinks of the last morning, in the bedroom, when he told Bruce how much he loved him, how sorry he was that he couldn't do more.

They are on the verge of something new, aren't they? This is truly unmarked territory.

He can't go back to the apartment and the butcher's shop, living his life under a face full of makeup, dyed hair, pretending not to know what he knows. Everything in him screams in revolt.

He can't go back to ravaging the nations, blood and terror, fire and bedlam. The appeal is still there, but he doesn't know how to find that madness again. That's a terrible freedom, cold freedom, and he knows all too well that he can't cut his moorings now. They've become too much a part of him.

What's left?

He looks up at Bruce, the hand under his glove slowly slowly warming. His life has always revolved around Bruce, one way or another. He's been whatever Bruce needed him to be—a nemesis, a friend, a lover. The truth is, whatever he is next, it's bound to be more of the same.

No going back. Now there's only forward.

If Bruce is going out there into the big bad world, all soft-skinned and newborn, someone is going to have to watch over him. Someone is going to have to make sure the fist of the world doesn't crush him beyond repair.

He doesn't know what that entails, exactly, but for the first time a future is starting to form before him.

"Jack?" Bruce says, as the silence stretches. "Are you here with me?"

Bruce believes in him. Maybe his faith is misplaced. Maybe not. It's heavy, but it is also a weight to hold onto, something you can grip with both hands.

"Yes," Jack says. "I'm here."

He grips on with both hands.


End file.
